


Off Again

by TheSigyn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-29 03:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21403636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: Drusilla returns to Sunnydale in an attempt to seduce Spike back to the darkness. She failed before, but Buffy is gone now, and Spike’s all alone. How long can he keep his promise to Buffy when all there is to hold him in the light is Dawn, his grief, and a dying memory?  Complete at 8 chapters.
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 15
Kudos: 45





	1. On Again

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Elysian Fields “Big Bad Challenge,” October, 2019. Betaed by the exquisite bewildered. Banner by KillerSnotMonster. Thank you everyone!   
WARNINGS ARE ACCURATE. STORY GETS DARK.

“This is going to be a good one, Spike. Hit me again.” 

“Yeah, whatever, just shut up,” Spike muttered. He reached for Buffy and gave a good smack to the side of her face. It was not satisfying. Her head snapped back and she turned into a roundhouse kick that threw her legs wide and provocative. Spike threw a block meant to dislocate a knee and forced her sideways. The knee, of course, did not dislocate, and Buffy managed to set herself back on her feet without even wobbling. Spike rolled his eyes. He really wished she wasn’t as good as she was. Then he wouldn’t have to keep fighting her at all. 

“Oh, Spike. That was a good hit.” 

Of course it was. He knew how to fight her. She pushed herself off the wall of the training lounge and flung herself at him again. He ducked, she dodged, he swung, she countered, he kicked, she threw another punch, clocked him in the jaw, and then stood back and stared at him. “Oh, Spike. Did I hurt you?” 

She had, actually. He’d cut his lip on his teeth and it was bleeding a little. “Stop that!” he told her. 

“I’m sorry, Spike.” 

“Shut _up!_” he growled, and threw himself at her. She flew back and hit the wall, landing in a sprawl on the ground. 

“We’re not trying to break her,” Willow said from behind him. 

“If she can’t handle me, she can’t handle what’s out there,” Spike growled. 

Buffy slowly picked herself off the ground, but she was glitching a little. “Oh, Spike. You’re so strong,” she breathed. “I can’t win against you. Please, please, just take me now.”

Spike glared at Willow. “Haven’t you fixed that yet?” he said through clenched teeth. 

Willow sighed. “Sorry. It’s part of the core programming. Every time I think I’ve circumnavigated it, another subprogram reinitiates it. Did you have her programed to throw herself at you when she lost?” 

Spike trembled with fury and bit his tongue, drawing blood. “Are we done?” he growled. 

“Yeah,” Willow said. “Buffy, you can stop fighting now.” 

“I already had stopped,” Buffy Bot said as Willow came up to check out the machine’s system. “I can’t win against Spike. He’s so strong and so brave and such a good fighter. And check out his abs. I mean really.” 

“Yeah,” Willow said. “That’s really great. Hold up your arms, I need to check your connections.” 

The Buffy-bot held up its arms obediently, and Willow lifted her shirt to get to her system panel. Spike felt faintly sick. How was he going to get through this? He was debasing himself by allowing Buffy’s friends to use the bot at all. There was nothing quite like having your adolescent fantasies parading themselves around in front of people you despise. But the bot was the best chance he had of getting some of the weight off his shoulders, and the last thing he needed was more weight on him. What he needed was to get drunk. Again. He’d left himself far too sober this evening so that he could participate in this wretched training session, and now the damn bot was humiliating him all over again. 

“I’m out,” Spike said to Willow. “You get that stuff out of its system, or I’m not helping you again.” 

“Hey, Willow’s doing the best she can do with the skeevy programming you saddled the thing with,” Xander said. “It’s not as if she did it intentionally.” 

Spike tilted his head, looking over his shoulder at Xander, and imagined the boy with his ribs spread open in a blood eagle, dripping viscera onto the floor. It was a comforting image. He licked the blood off his lip and tried to pretend it was Xander’s. It didn’t taste human, but that didn’t matter. If he was going to be chastised for his fantasies, he should be allowed some bloody ones. There was a time when he thought he wouldn’t have even bothered to bite Xander. Now that he knew the bloke a bit better he had come to the conclusion that he probably wouldn’t taste terrible. But he’d still rather torture the boy than eat him. It was times like this that he wanted to torture him excruciatingly. Spike had never really been that into torture -- he was more of an action man -- but some people really, really deserved it. 

“Intentional or not, I’m helping you,” Spike finally said. “Not like I’m getting paid for it.”

“Nobody asked you,” Xander snapped. 

“Actually, you did,” Willow said. “You came up to him and asked, hey, could you give us a bit of a hand now that Buffy’s gone,” Willow said. She couldn’t possibly have realized she was twisting the knife bringing this up. “And then you told him he was doing you a solid, and it really showed how he was a good guy at heart. And then you clapped him on the back and shook his hand and said we’d all get through this together, and we were a team now, and then--”

“Yeah, we were all there,” Spike pointed out. 

“Anyway, I’ll see what I can do about the bot,” Willow said. “It really is hard with all the subroutines. You might just have to accept that it’s always going to revert to its baseline. Warren was very thorough in his programming.” 

“Just like Spike’s thorough when he makes love,” Buffybot said. “Have you ever had him go down on you? It’s just amazing.”

Willow blushed, Xander looked scandalized, and both stared at the bot for a heartbeat before slowly turning to look at Spike, but that had been the last straw on the dromedary for him, and all they saw was the door to the Magic Box swinging shut behind him. Unfortunately he had vampire ears. He couldn’t miss hearing Willow say, “Well that’s kind of sweet, in a creepy kind of way.” 

It was one thing the Scoobies knowing that Spike had basically masturbated to/with the bot. It was another their knowing the intricacies of his lovemaking techniques, and that he had wasted time pretending he was pleasuring that soulless hunk of plasticine and silicon. Truly, it had been an act of desperation while Buffy was alive and tormenting him with her body, her scent, her hair, her… everything. But now that she was gone, really and truly gone, that machine had become the bane of his existence. There was nothing, truly nothing, that he had ever hated as virulently, not his old human social circle, not Angelus, not Buffy when they had been enemies, nothing. He wanted that machine destroyed utterly. 

But the reason he couldn’t just break it, crush it into messes, and use the pieces to clog Xander’s toilet for good measure, was walking into the Magic Box just as he stormed out. 

She was with Tara. None of them ever let Dawn wander alone these days, since they weren’t sure that Glory’s minions weren’t going to take it into their scabby heads to come after her, and they still weren’t sure what had happened to the Knights of Byzantium, either where they had come from or where they had gone to. Spike nearly ran into Dawn and Tara on the way out, and he instinctively raised a fist to punch his way through the obstacle -- whatever obstacle, he wasn’t thinking -- and the chip in his head noticed and sent a twinge through his brain. It held him up a second, and Dawn took the arm that wasn’t raised in a fist. “Spike, I thought you were working with Buffy tonight. Bot,” she amended. “Buffy Bot. I was coming over to help.” 

The niblet, for reasons unfathomable to Spike, liked to watch him and Buffy Bot spar. She had a tendency to forget to call it a “bot,” also, which led Spike to wonder if she was using the bot the way he himself used to, pretending it was real. He couldn’t pretend anymore, and the fact that Dawn loved the thing made him hate it even more. Couldn’t she tell it was a dead thing made of all his insecurities and longings, and couldn’t love her back? But she was a child, Dawn, cusp of adulthood or not, and he couldn’t explain it to her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t _know_. She just didn’t feel it the way he did. 

“I’m out,” was all he said, mostly looking at Tara. “You hear me, I’m out. Tell Red she’s got to get that thing sorted, or I’m done playing.” 

“Oh,” Tara said. She glanced at Dawn. “I’ll, uh, do that. Here, Dawn, you stay here with Spike and I’ll… check with Willow.” 

It was transparent. Tara was hoping Dawn would calm him down. Trouble was, she was probably right. He hated that he was so predictable these days. He squeezed his head with the hand that had been raised in a fist and then ran it down his face. “How’s it going, niblet?” he asked Dawn. 

“Spike? Are you okay?” 

He was dead inside twice, rotting from a broken heart, bleeding from the deepest cut imaginable, full of anger, grief, hatred, self-loathing, despair and exhaustion, and he had no idea what to do to fix it. It all came out in his voice when he lied. “Yeah, I’m doing fine, little bit. Don’t you worry about me.” 

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s sit down.” She led him to the bench outside the Magic Box and sat down beside him. He reluctantly bent his knees to join her. He knew where this was going to go, but she was Dawn. He couldn’t just walk off. He couldn’t just… leave her. 

“I wanted to thank you for helping Willow,” Dawn said. “I don’t know if any of the others have. But for me, I wanted to thank you. Buffy Bot is why I’m going to be able to stay with all of you, so…”

“I know.”

“It’s been months now. People are going to start asking questions.”

“I know.” 

“So it’s really important that we make sure it works and…” Her voice was breaking. 

“I know.” 

“And I want to stay with you guys. Who love me and know me and know what I am and can protect me, and didn’t forget I was ever your daughter and….”

“Hey, what’s that?” Spike said, breaking through Dawn’s fresh tears. “What are you going on about?” 

“I got a call from my dad today,” Dawn said. “It lasted two minutes. He wanted to talk to Buffy, and when I said she was busy, he didn’t want to talk to me. I’m afraid he wants to take me, maybe, but if he does he doesn’t want to talk to me, and Buffy’s not here, and she’s not here, and I don’t know what to do….”

“Hey, pet, shh.” He put his arm around Dawn and pulled her to him. She was warm and lovely and real and Buffy’s, the only thing left of her, and he felt a fresh stab of anguish as she hugged him tightly, her living arms sneaking under his coat to hold his cold flesh, the smell of her hair -- she’d been using Buffy’s shampoo -- wafting up to grab him by the face and force him to remember the slayer. The pain twisted and tears threatened his own eyes again. God, he wished he could feel angry again, but that had all melted under the tears he always shared with Dawn. “We’re gonna look after you, right? That’s the deal. And if your wanker dad tries to take you, we’ll show him what for, right?” 

“We can’t fight him.” 

“You watch me,” Spike said. 

“Spike! He’s my dad! I love him! Even though… I don’t think I’ve ever met him. Not for real. I just don’t want to live with him, that’s all. I want Buffy back. Can you understand that? I just want Buffy back.” 

Spike was trembling under the weight of the tears he didn’t want to start shedding again. “We all understand that, love.” 

“I know you do,” Dawn said. “You loved her, too.” 

_Now twist the knife widdershins, _Spike thought. 

She pulled away and looked up at him, her blue eyes shining with her tears. “So if we can just get the bot reliable enough to fool people. Even if it doesn’t fool the demons, it’s got to fool the social workers and my dad. So thanks for helping get it ready.”

Spike nodded, unable to come up with anything to say. 

“And thank you for having it built. That way we have something left of her,” she added. 

Spike nearly grunted with the pain of that. He wished he could get angry at Dawn. The truth was, sometimes a hatred for her rose up as strong as that he held for Xander or Willow or Giles, a seething resentment that his promise to Buffy kept him from abandoning her. But even though the resentment rose, the anger would never stay. Dawn was one of those whom, had he still been a killer, he would have left alive. There were always some he’d felt a compulsion to spare, even sometimes to save from Drusilla or Angelus. There was no real rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes they were young, sometimes they were old. Usually they were women, though he’d eat other women with relish, so that wasn’t the only factor. But something about their eyes or their hair or their manner would catch him, and he’d feel like the world was a better place with them in it. And Dawn had always been one of those, ever since he’d known her. Joyce had been one, too. 

So he couldn’t hold anger at Dawn for long, no matter how often she twisted the knife or stuck her finger in the wound or gouged new emotional slices in his psyche. Or however much she reminded him of Buffy. 

He could see Buffy in her face now, in the tilt of her head, in the way her smile shone through her tears when she looked up at him. He clenched his teeth and took her gently by the upper arm. “We’ll get the bot sorted, we will,” he said. “And you’ll be safe with us, I promise.” 

“You know, once we get the bot working, you can… you can go do… other stuff,” Dawn said. 

“What was that?”

“Other stuff,” Dawn said. “I know you don’t really like working with the others. And, well, it’s not like I’m a kid. I’ll be all right. I just wanted you to know. Once we have that to help protect me, you’ll be able to leave if you want.” 

Dawn randomly did this, and he hadn’t been able to figure out why. She didn’t do it to the others, but to Spike she kept hinting that he could leave. He didn’t have to stay, he could go do whatever he wanted. At first he’d thought she didn’t want him around, but he was starting to think it was deeper than that. Buffy had been abandoned by every man she ever thought cared about her, even Xander at times. Dawn had been made from Buffy’s DNA and her subconscious. He was thinking it was just possible that he was bearing the brunt of Angel’s abandonment, and not even through Buffy, but through Dawn. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a thing -- Dru used to tell Spike that he’d surely leave her, use it as a weapon when they were fighting. Well, now Dru had left _him_, and Buffy had abandoned Dawn in the most complete way possible, and he was not planning on leaving Dawn ever, ever, he’d made a promise, never. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said darkly. 

“But you must have better things to do than look after a--”

His grip on his arms tightened and he glared, teeth clenched, eyes narrow. “I am not leaving you alone,” he growled. 

She shuddered and finally nodded, then fell back to give him another hug. Fuck! Why did she have to smell so much like Buffy? “It’s all right, pet,” he whispered. “We got you.” And there they were, the tears he’d been fighting, they won, he lost, he was crying again. “We’re here for you, I swear it.” And then he was past words and sobbing into Dawn’s hair, and she was sobbing into his shirt, and really, this would be funny how often they did this, if it wasn’t so fucking tragic every single fucking time. God, he hoped no one caught him this time. Last time it was Tara, and she had the decency to walk away, but Xander had a tendency to get awkward, and Willow would annoyingly ask if he was okay. Fortunately Giles knew better than to admit the failure of the stiff upper lip, but it was bad enough they’d seen him cry before. It was hellish to think they still knew he was still pouring out these buckets of salt. 

Finally Dawn started to compose herself, and Spike forced himself to do so, as well. He could cry when Dawn did, but he couldn’t let her know that he cried by himself, for hours, ugly, heaving sobs, sometimes all night, crying so hard it got in the way of his drinking, which was the only thing which could numb the pain. “Now you go on, little bit, eh? Go inside and see if Willow needs you for the bot, yeah? There are some questions only you can give it the answers to. Questions about your childhood and such. It needs me, but it needs you, too, yeah?” 

“Yeah, okay,” Dawn said. She gave him another squeeze before standing up. “I love you, Spike.” 

“Shh, you’ll spoil my image,” Spike said, pushing her away again. There had been times when he’d cracked and admitted to the chit that he loved her too, but not often. Not tonight. Now if only she didn’t get clingy….

No. Fortunately she didn’t. Her hand lingered on his shoulder as she moved into the Magic Box, but she went in, and he was left alone again, and he was free. He bolted up and ran, actually ran as fast as he could to the liquor store. He had booze at home, but the store was closer, and it was about to close. He wandered the scant aisles for a minute before the clerk asked him if he could help him. “I need your highest proof anything. What is that, Everclear?” 

“It’s pretty strong,” the clerk said, though he should have known Spike by now. “It’s better if you cut it with something.” 

“Yeah, I know,” Spike growled, knowing his favorite thing to cut it with was the blood of virgins. The clerk turned around to pull it from the shelf behind the counter, and Spike slipped the bottle of off-brand bourbon he’d slipped up his sleeve into his pocket. 

“There you go, sir,” the clerk said, counting out Spike’s change. Spike grabbed the paper brusquely, leaving the coins to spin on the counter, and pushed his way out the door without grunting a thank you. 

He saved the Everclear to cut with blood at home and started swigging the bourbon. It was harsh, because it was the stuff on the floor, and it burned, and he relished the burn and kept on drinking. He moved, because when he moved sometimes he could escape the ghosts haunting his memories, though sometimes they came up and bit him, like today, when he turned a corner and there was that rickety old tower that Buffy threw herself off of, hanging above the buildings on the other side of the street, and he took another swig of his bourbon and sobbed and cursed and hit the wall and then went and took more bourbon and crossed the street and broke his way into the construction site, and there was the pile of rubble Buffy’s shattered body had lain upon, and Spike felt a twinge in his own body as all the bruises and breaks of his own fall came flooding back to him, so he took more booze, and closed his eyes, and muttered to himself, “There had to be a way.” He took a final swig of bourbon then closed the bottle and slipped it safely in his pocket. 

He started climbing the tower. This was not the first time he had done this. He climbed the tower thinking of how he had saved Buffy. Because she couldn’t be dead, she just couldn’t, he had to have saved her. So how had he saved her? “I was stronger than I was. Not in my muscles, just stubborn. I let you save Dawn, while I faced Glory. She beat me up, ripped me apart, turned me to dust, but you got there before Doc sliced Dawn open. You got her down. And yeah, then you had to face Glory, too, but Dawn was already off the tower. She ran, and you fought that god while my dust was floating around you. Cheering you on, yeah?” 

Tears streamed down his face. 

He sat down at the top of the tower, the wind whistling cruelly through the beams, and looked up at the stars, and debating throwing himself off again, because maybe it would dust him this time, maybe that was the way out of this feeling, this grief that had poisoned him, only he’d promised Buffy, to the end of the world, he’d promised Buffy to look after Dawn, look after her, to the end of the world, he’d promised. “Well I didn’t promise to be happy about it!” he shouted drunkenly at the sky. “Fuck you, you blasted sanctimonius bitch. You’re well out of it.” He sucked down more bourbon, and busied himself with that for a while. 

He was very, very drunk when he smelled the coming dawn. Had he passed out for a while? He thought he probably had, because he was now lying down atop the tower, staring up at the stars, and he thought about just lying there and letting the sun take him, take him away from these feelings, but no, he’d had this argument with himself earlier tonight, he’d made a sodding promise, and he owed Buffy… well, no, he didn’t owe Buffy, because she’d never done anything to make him beholden except _be_ _wonderful_, and he sobbed, and crept down off his perch, literally crawling down the stairs and ladders of the tower because he couldn’t stand upright, and then he lost his balance on one of the ladders and he fell, and he lay on his back and moaned, and had something cracked? He was too drunk to tell if he’d broken anything, but he groaned up at the sky, “You fucking bitch! Leave me here all alone!” 

“I always come back.” The voice came through his ears thickly, muted but musical, and it hurt, and he cringed up onto his knees again, and then felt sick, not that a vampire could get alcohol poisoning (at least he didn’t think they could) then found himself face to face -- well, no, face to thighs with a feminine pair of legs, and it was Buffy come back for him, it had to be Buffy, and he sobbed again because he was so glad to see her, and reached for her and grabbed her, and she fell to her knees before him and wrapped him up in her long arms -- arms much longer than he was expecting for Buffy, but it didn’t matter, because who else would be on this tower? And he sobbed and whispered, “I love you, I love you. I missed you so much.” 

“Of course you did, you bad dog,” came the voice whispering through his thick head. “You’ve let yourself get all muddy.” 

Muddy. He was definitely muddy. Everything was muddy. Buffy didn’t sound right. “What… what do I -- what-what?” 

“You didn’t think I was going to leave it at that, did you, pet?” came the voice again, and it really didn’t sound like Buffy, and he opened his bleary eyes to gaze up at long, dark hair, and a body lithe and sinewy and skin pale as the shining moon, and recognition tore at his brain until he realized it wasn’t Buffy, and the name swam and swam until it dove onto his tongue, and he whispered, “Dru!” before a sharp blow to his jaw sent him down, down, down, was he falling off the tower? He didn’t care, he was down in the drink and the pain and the confusion and Dru’s pale face dragging him further down to hell. 


	2. Off Again

A soft finger touched his face. He opened his eyes to Buffy’s green ones gazing down at him. She looked concerned. “This is dangerous, Spike.” 

“So what else is new?” Spike muttered. He felt sleepy and content, and everything was heavy. “I love you.” 

“Shut up, I’m trying to be serious,” Buffy said. “You have to guard yourself.” 

The good feelings were fading. “I’m sick of guarding things. I’m a killer, not a guardian.” 

“You’re the one I count on the most,” Buffy said. “You always have been, even when you were evil.” 

“And I’m not evil now?” 

Buffy bit her lip and touched his forehead again. The touch felt distant and misty, and he couldn’t really feel it properly. “Just be careful, Spike. I can’t protect you. You have to do it yourself this time.” 

“Don’t want to,” Spike muttered. But she was fading away. Fading away. “No. Not _fair!_” Spike snarled at her, wrestling his head up, only to feel as if it was full of falling rocks. The light was dim. It wasn’t Buffy. 

It wasn’t Buffy. It was never Buffy. But there had been someone who had caught him on the tower. He tried to sit up, and found himself tangled in chains. Someone had caught him and put him in chains. Wait a minute. He knew the chains. And he knew where he was, too. He was chained against the wall, sprawled on the floor of his own crypt, in the lower level. Someone had lit the candles and the light was on. He wished he’d been thrown into the bed. Instead he was on the carpets he’d put down for when Dawn was visiting, to keep the place from feeling so chill. He tried to sit up again and groaned. He couldn’t be sure if it was the drink or the blow to the chin. 

The drink. He scrabbled at his pocket. The bottle of Everclear was there, but broken. That explained the smell. He reeked of alcohol. He looked in his other pocket. Empty. He’d probably dropped the bourbon bottle in the climb. He slipped the broken Everclear bottle behind his back, where he could grab it at a moment’s notice, and looked around the chamber. He could smell nothing with the scent of alcohol, harsh in his nose. “Hello?”

“Round and round and round again, we go,” came a voice from above him. 

After a hundred years, he had no questions. He knew that voice. “Dru! Stop playing silly buggers and get down here!” 

Drusilla giggled her most evil laugh and a moment later he heard her footsteps on the ladder. Click, click, click, she was wearing some kind of heeled boots, such as she’d always preferred when she was alive, such as he had to spend hours raiding shoe shops for once they stopped being popular. There she was, dressed in relatively modern fashion for once, a tight burgundy knee-length dress, her nails deep red. “Well, well, puppy’s straining at his chain, is he?” she said, sauntering toward him. “You’re in the doghouse, Spike. I’m very, very cross with you.” 

“Whatever game you’re playing, Drusilla, you know I don’t play anymore.” 

Dru clicked her tongue at him, “Tsk, tsk, you know you don’t get to choose the game when I’m vexed. It was very, very uncivil of you to change the game on me.”

“Dru, what do you want with me? I don’t have time for riddles.”

“Time? You’ve got nothing but time now. A whole eternity as the lost puppy, pining for his mistress.” 

“What do mean by that?” It was not common knowledge that the slayer was dead. At least, it wasn’t supposed to be. 

“Did you _really_ think you could keep secrets from your princess, lover?” Dru asked. She leaned closer, but not close enough for Spike to try grabbing her. Not yet. “Your precious slayer done you in when she did herself.” 

“Right,” Spike said. “So what’s that supposed to mean for me, then? You think it bothers me?” 

“Oh, Spike. You never could hide it from me. You told me last time how you loved her so. You think I’d forgotten? And now you've got nothing to do but sniff around her old lamp posts, wait patiently at her doorway for a mistress that’s never coming back. Poor abandoned puppy.” 

“All right, Dru, baby,” Spike said, weary of her nonsense already, his head pounding. “I’m the lost puppy. What do you want with me?”

“What do I want?” She hissed and raised her nails. “What do you think I always wanted, my love?”

What did Dru want? Spike closed his eyes. Everything. She always wanted everything.

“Do whatever you want with me, love. At your mercy, me.” 

This was a dangerous thing to say to Dru. She enjoyed torturing, Spike had brassed her off severely the last time she’d been here, and she’d never been above tormenting him merely for sport. But rather than turning painfully seductive, Dru suddenly turned indignant. “Ha! You brush me off at a whim? You think I’d forgotten what happened the last time, Spike?” 

“No,” Spike said quietly. “I don’t think you’ve forgotten. Chain me. Torture me. Stake me. You wouldn’t be doing anything that wouldn’t be doing me a _favor!_” He was shouting back at her now. “Come on, Dru, give as good as you got, yeah? Break my spine, slice me open, treat me like one of your dolls, I’m _not playing!_” 

“You’re always playing!” Drusilla hissed. 

“Whatever, pet, you can’t surprise me anymore.”

She kicked him in the face. Those heeled boots were painful. 

He nodded, bruised but unsurprised. “That’s right, love. Give it me good.” He sank back further against the wall, his hand closing on the bottle. Now she was going to use her nails, scratch him proper, and maybe he could get a good hit back. 

“All right, baby,” Drusilla whispered, and then she did surprise him. She kissed him. 

For two seconds he let her, and then he pulled his head aside. “Dru,” he murmured. 

“Don’t fight the bad dog, puppy. Let him have his little pleasures,” Drusilla whispered into his mouth. She pressed her lips against him again, and he couldn’t really pull away with her hands on either side of his head. He struggled and pulled out the bottle, whipping it up to hold it against her chin. She grabbed both his hands with hers and laughed joyously, her lips spreading in a blood red smile. “That’s right, baby, breathe it in!” And she gently rubbed her head against the broken glass. Blood spilled from her lower jaw, dribbled down her chin onto his face, confused him. Then she grabbed the bottle and tossed it to the side. It shattered against the stone, and she knelt straddled across his thighs, bleeding down her pretty dress. “Baby,” she whispered, kissing across his forehead. “Poor baby.” 

“Get off me, Dru.” 

“Breathe it in, baby. Take in the blood and the pain.” Then she whispered, heady in his ear. “You want to be mine again.”

Blood was pouring into his mouth. Her blood. The very blood that had created him. “No, I don’t.” He writhed and managed to push her off him a little. 

“Shh,” Dru whispered. 

“No.” 

“Why not? I’m not your pretty slayer?” Her nails dug into the side of his neck. There. He’d expected this, too. “You know I don’t like it when you don’t perform well, Spike.” 

“I don’t perform for anyone anymore,” Spike said. “You know what I don’t miss about being with you, Dru? Having to play the part. Always the dashing swain. I don’t feel it. I never did.”

“Don’t lie,” Dru said, her nail going up to his ear, digging into the ear canal.

“I’m not lying,” Spike snarled. “You can torture me, twist me, break me, bend me, there’s nothing you can do to me that isn’t just going to make me feel better.” 

“That’s the plan, baby,” Drusilla said. “Did you think I came here to hurt you?” She was still dripping blood. 

“That’s all we ever did. Hurt each other, pet.” 

“That’s what you like.” 

“You can’t hurt me anymore,” Spike said. He laughed as he realized how true it was. He was in such pain, nothing Dru did even came close. “You can’t.” 

“But I _can_ make you feel, Spike.” She undulated over his groin. “You know I can.” 

Fortunately his cock was soft and unresponsive, and he laughed again, softly, scornfully. “Like I said, pet. Do what you want.” 

She stopped and looked down on him. “We’ll see how you feel in the morning.” And she climbed off him. 

He didn’t expect that. He also didn’t expect her to leave him down there. For hours.

***

_Leave him be, let him simmer. Simmer through the summer like the broken pot he is. _Drusilla was nearly dancing as she moved through Spike’s crypt. She could hear him down there sometimes, cursing her, or straining at his chains, or crying. Yes, crying. She could always hear him crying. 

It was his tears had called her back again. Her boy in trouble, sobbing for his mummy, though he didn’t want her back again. She knew that by now. She had to melt the burning core of him away. The slayer’s fire-love had burned away the blood-love, and she had to get that back for him. It should be possible, now that the slayer was out of this world. 

Where she’d gone, Dru wasn’t sure. The girl was dead, she knew that. It was whispered on the wind, wafted in the scent of the hellmouth. But the future still held echoes of the bitch, and that hurt Drusilla’s throat. This was her last chance to claim her brave knight back again. She had to make him leave this place. Had to wean him off the slayer until the memory of her choked him. 

Right now the memory only leaked out his eyes, filling and filling him. Drusilla needed to fill him with something else, to block the slayer out, inch by inch, row by row, pour blood and power and need into him until all that love that poisoned him was flushed away.

So she left him alone, tearing at his chains, while she went to get someone to eat. It wasn’t hard to find -- wander into the first restaurant she passed and drop a spoon, flash a little cleavage at a man old enough to be flattered, but young enough to still care. Make a wicked suggestion holding his eyes with hers, and he follows like a dog, all the way back to the pretty little lair Spike had made himself. A bachelor’s game he was playing. He never did well alone. She’d show him the error of his ways soon enough. She had plans and dreams and ditties, and she wanted her baby back.

She tossed the man into the sarcophagus while she made a little cocktail in one of Spike’s whiskey bottles. She listened carefully. Spike was crying again. He was probably sober by now, and the pain the slayer had filled him with was leaking out his eyes again. No matter. She’d offer him respite. She lifted the lid off the sarcophagus, only to find that her meal had shaken her off. He yelled and surged to escape, but Dru vamped out and bit him, cracking his neck while she did it. The crunch was always such a beautiful sound. She missed Spike crunching and cracking his way through his meals, like the bad dog he was. She held out a cup for some of the blood to pour into, then laid the man over a tray to catch any more spare drops as he bled out. 

When the bleeding stopped, she poured some of the blood into Spike’s flask, which he’d left at his makeshift bar downstairs. He was so tamed these days that she knew she’d have to hide it. Nasty little sparks in his head that had weaned him off the blood. She needed to get her baby back on the teat again, suckling properly. It would take a game of switch and steal, and pixies behind her head warned her it might not work at first. “Ssst!” she hissed at them, and they tinkled back into the walls. No, no, hold on closely. Couldn’t let it take her now. 

When Spike was there, then she could indulge. Then she could let the pixies and the nasties and the dancing take her, let the stars swirl in the daytime, and the songs sing her into nothingness. But since Spike had turned to the slayer, she’d held tight to her sanity, or as tightly as she could. At first she’d shoved him away, hoping the taste of ashes would fade from her mouth, but no. She couldn’t dismiss him so easily. So she’d come back, but he’d already been poisoned. He roped her up and threatened her, offering her dust as a sacrifice for the slayer. She was saddened by that more than angered, and knew she’d had to give him up.

But then she saw the visions, heard the whispers, knew the slayer was gone again. Troubled visions still ate at her. Spike burning from a stone at his chest. Shadow demons lurking. Baby slayers waving their little arms. All of these still echoed in the future. But there was a path, one thorny path in the forest of nasties, one chance to bring Spike back to her. She had to act, and she had to act now, and she could torture him for threatening her again later, after she had him. Darla and Angel had their own little tragedy playing out for them in LA. She’d never get her daughter/grandmother back. But her son…. There was still a chance for Spike. 

She took up the whiskey cocktail and the flask of blood and slipped down the ladder. 

“Pouring out again, Spike?” she asked, as she caught the tears glinting on his cheeks. He’d always been a weeper. Not like Angelus, who had too much demon in him to cry. Her own sweet Spike, so easily moved to tears. 

“Dru, let me go. It’s night again, you’ve had your fun. Let me go.”

“I’ve brought you a drink, baby boy,” she said. 

He leaned his head back, exhausted. “I’ve no time for tea parties, Dru.” 

“It’s whiskey for the devil,” she said. “You’ve been drinking too much, and no, it’s not enough.” She held out the bottle of whiskey. “Would this help, baby?”

“Why would you give me that?” 

“To help stop the pain,” she said. 

Spike scoffed. “You like me in pain.” 

“Not this kind,” she said. She sat down on his lap and offered him the bottle. “Take it, Spike. You know I love you.” 

He regarded her softly. “Dru, you know it’s over. You’ve made it over. Over and over again.” He closed his eyes. “You’ve never loved me.” 

“Is that what you think?” She unscrewed the bottle and pressed it to his lips. “Drink up, my love. Taste my love for you.” 

He kept his lips sealed, and she pushed, sliding his lips open against his teeth, until the whiskey slopped into his tongue, filling up his mouth, until he need swallow or drown -- either would work for her purposes, though swallowing would work better. And he did swallow, and she almost cackled with laughter as she rolled off him, waiting. Waiting. 

He didn’t notice at first. He sputtered and spat, feeling only the burn of the whiskey, and he glared at her, and then spat again, and then gagged, and the realization flickered through his eyes first, then the rest of his face, and he stared at her in horror. “Holy water!” 

“Just a drop,” she confessed, and she couldn’t keep the grin off her face. The whiskey and holy water cocktail had done its job. “Feeling hot, baby doll?”

“You’re going to dust me!” He strained against the chains. “Is this how you want it, Dru? I thought you wanted me back!” 

“I do. Do you want to feel better, Spike?”

Thoughtfulness flashed in his eyes. They both knew if he managed to wash it out within a few minutes, dilute it, he might survive. How gone was he? Would he let himself dust? Well, at least then the slayer wouldn’t have him. At least then his dust would forever be Drusilla’s. 

“Help me,” he finally said. 

“Wash it out, baby,” she said, holding up his flask.

He reached up to take it, drinking and spitting the blood, then swallowing it. Blood would heal. He knew that. The burning in his mouth would be so strong, he’d barely taste it. Shame, that, but she had to get him started somehow. He’d hesitated the last time. That hesitation spoke libraries. She knew she’d have to force his hand this time. 

The flask was almost empty when he stopped. He panted, staring at it, before looking up at her. “That was human, wasn’t it, pet?” 

“You didn’t expect me to drink rats out the sewer, did you?” 

“You like rat,” Spike snapped. “Dru, I can’t bloody kill! You know what human does, I’ll need to get off it again!” He grunted with irritation, and Dru saw a dozen days of agony in his memory, flickering though his eyes, days of longing and hunger as the withdrawal from the human blood tormented his body. 

“Not if I stay with you,” Dru promised. She knelt down again and touched his face. “And I will this time, if you’ll only let me. I’ll stay with you.” She kissed him. “I’ll stay with you.” 

He didn’t pull his head away, though he was passive as she kissed him. Yes. She was getting to him. She pulled away and went back up the stairs. She filled a jar he had with the rest of the tray of blood, then kicked the body down the ladder, in case Spike wanted more. Then she went back to him, walking slowly, as if trying not to frighten him, though she knew that often frightened people more. She curled up on Spike’s lap and held up the jar for him. “Take more, baby,” she said. “Just take more. You’ll be stronger then.”

He hesitated. Still he hesitated. She bit back the screeching anger she wanted to unleash and took a deep breath. “I know she’d say you shouldn’t, but she’s not here, Spike. She’s not here. She’s not here.” 

His body trembled beneath hers. 

“She’s not here, love. She’s not here. She’s not. She’s not here. Drink. It’ll make it better. She’s not here.” 

She could have tried to use her thrall on him, but he wasn’t very susceptible to it, and when he shook it off, she knew he’d just be angry at her for it. He hated when she tried to hypnotize him. She had to be more subtle. But this was Spike, and he knew his mind, and she knew his body, and she knew his spirit, and she knew how to persuade him. Coaxing, touching, pressing the jar gently against his lips, slowly Spike took a sip, then another, then another, until the blood was all gone, and Dru followed it up with a kiss from her own lips. The blood was having an effect already. There was a harder edge to his mouth, a hunger for more. She kissed him again, and finally he wasn’t passive, but kissed her back, angrily, then pulled away. “I don’t want it, Dru.”

“Yes, you do.” 

“I don’t. I don’t--” He closed his eyes and turned his head to the ceiling, as if asking for strength. Tears were touching his eyes again. 

“Don’t mind it, love,” Dru whispered. “She’s not here. Don’t mind it.” She straddled him and gently tore open his shirt, caressing his body. He lay passive and let her do it. Well, that could work, too. 

She’d rarely taken him so gently before. It was always nasty thrusting against a wall, or wrestling with her nails sharp down his back, or passionate rutting like the wild dogs they were, but he needed something else now, and she pushed him down and stripped him, and he lay back with the holy water and the human blood coursing through his veins, and she kissed and kissed and kissed him, stripping him slowly, revealing her own body in a deliberate dance, coaxing his body to respond when at first his member lay passive and unresponsive as the rest of him. 

It took a long time. It took patience. First to coax his body to life, then to soothe it back into peace. Sometimes he’d try to listlessly push her off, but he was chained, he was flush with human blood for the first time in months, and he was in such pain that any good feeling was clearly a relief for him. He cried, over and over again, and she kissed it away with tenderness, and sometimes with just a little bit of her nails, punctuating the pleasure with just the right kind of pain. 

When she was finished she lay on the floor with him, and he slowly and with as much deliberation as she had used earlier, wrapped one of his chains around her throat. “I could snap your neck right now,” he said darkly. 

“But you won’t,” she said, not even trying to move the chain off herself. She just lay there with him, them both tangled in the chains, lacing her nails over his chest. 

She didn’t have him yet, not completely. But she’d made her claim, now. It was just a matter of time before he fell back. 

  
  


***

Spike felt sick. He was full of resentment, a little self-loathing, a touch of disgust, and a soupçon of anger. The trouble was, all of that felt so much better than the heart-shattering grief he’d felt for the last seventy-two days that feeling sick was a positive relief. He lay there, the chain around Dru’s throat, naked and forcibly sated, trying to decide if he wanted to kill her. He did, but he didn’t. Finally he just closed his hand around her wrist tight enough that she squealed and dug her nails into his chest. The pain felt good, and he relaxed his grip. 

Vampires were never ones to cling to sentiment or tenderness. This wasn’t the first time Dru had forced him into intimacy when he didn’t feel like it. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done the same to her many times, as well. The trouble was that right now it just felt so _normal_ compared to all the righteous grief he’d been feeling that he didn’t even know what to do with it. He hated Dru in that moment, and he almost loved her more than he ever had before. 

The two had never been mutually exclusive in his mind. 

_What now?_ he kept asking himself. He expected Dru to do something, or himself to do something, or something to happen between them that would end the stalemate they’d just entered into, but the break was not from either of them. The break happened when a small voice called out, “Spike? Are you here?” 

Spike sat up, gripping Drusilla tightly by the wrist. That was Dawn. That was Dawn, that was _Dawn_, what was she doing in his crypt in the middle of the night? 

“Spike, it’s us, are you here?” 

That was Tara. And he heard them murmuring above, and another voice, probably Willow. What were they doing here with Dawn? Why had they taken her out and through a graveyard? What were they doing here? He yanked Drusilla down and held her against the wall by the throat, his chains clanking. “Yeah, I’ll be right up,” Spike shouted up at them. 

“Spike?” Dawn’s voice was dangerously close to the ladder. 

“Hold on, I’m….” Excuse, excuse, what was an excuse? Oh, right. Humans had that modesty thing. “I’m not decent!” 

“Oh.” He could almost hear Dawn’s blush. “Sorry.” She backed away from the ladder. 

“Dru, you let me go or I will break every bone in your neck one by one,” he hissed at her. 

She only gurgled up at him, her blue eyes harsh. 

“Spike?” Willow called down. “Tara just found out she’s got a paper due tomorrow, when we thought it was next week. We need to go in to the library. Can we leave Dawn with you?” 

“Just hang on!” Spike shouted up to them. “Where’s the key, Dru?” he growled. 

Drusilla glanced at the pile of clothes she’d left by their feet, Spike reached for it with his toes and pulled her dress up until he could rifle in it with his left hand. “It’s not there!” he snapped. 

“It is,” Drusilla whispered back, and he looked again, finally finding it in a miniscule pocket that some designer thought was sufficient for a women’s garment. He unlocked his manacles and kicked Dru to the ground before grabbing up his trousers. His t-shirt was beyond hope, but he buttoned up his overshirt to cover it, standing on Drusilla’s wrist while he did it. 

“Spike? Is there something wrong?” That was Tara, calling down the ladder. “Because if it’s too much trouble I can ask for an extension….” 

“No, I’ll be right there,” Spike called, torn. What could he do with Drusilla? Well, the obvious answer was to chain her up where she’d chained him. He grabbed her arm to do just that, but she thrashed and kicked out at him, much less drunk and addled than he had been when she chained him up. They struggled and fought, and then Willow called down, “Spike? Is there someone down there with you?” 

Dru clocked him in the jaw, and he lost his grip on her. She skittered to the edge of the cave, naked and fanged, and Spike backed up. She could be _very _dangerous when she got like this. “No, don’t come down. I’m coming up,” he called. He didn’t know why he felt he couldn’t tell them Dru was there. It wasn’t as if he’d invited her. But considering what had happened the last time Dru showed up, and considering her state of undress, and his own disheveledness, and the opinion the Scoobies had of him anyway, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to convince them that he and Dru were just being old enemies. Or that what they had done had been more than a little forced on him. He was pretty sure he couldn’t kill her before any questions were raised. 

He climbed up the ladder, knowing he’d just have to leave Dru to her own devices, and caught Dawn by the arm, turning to glare at the two witches. “What are you doing here? What were you thinking, dragging her out to a crypt in the middle of the night?” 

“It’s not too late, is it?” Willow asked Tara. “We were in a bind. Xander can’t come over, and Giles is… well….” Giles had a tendency to be pretty drunk if he was called in unexpectedly. So did Spike, for that matter; but he was undeniably sober right now. “We just thought we’d bring her by and check if it was okay.” 

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine,” Spike said hurriedly, bustling Dawn toward the door. “But I’ll watch her at the house, yeah?” 

“At the house? We just thought we’d leave her here and pick her up on our way back from--”

“Sounds great. I get it. Do the college thing,” Spike said. “You go. I’ll take the little bit.” 

“Spike you’re hurting me,” Dawn said, struggling against his arm. 

“Can’t be,” Spike said. His chip wasn’t going off. 

“Well, I don’t _like it,_” Dawn snapped as they got outside. She snatched her arm away, and Spike made a grab for her, and missed. 

“Are you sure it’s okay?” Tara asked. “I thought it wouldn’t disturb you if Dawn just spent a little time watching TV in your crypt.”

Since that was entirely why Spike had redone his crypt last month, so that Dawn would be more comfortable when she had to stay there, the idea that he’d suddenly hie off to the house with her was a bit odd. “Had a couple demon buddies over the other night,” he said. “Not exactly cleanly blokes. Better if you don’t go downstairs for the nonce.”

“I’m not worried by a little mess, Spike.” 

“I just thought the owl pellets of hair and bones would be a bit much for you,” Spike said, “but if you’re all right with the idea of mildewing rat viscera--”

“Ew. All right. We’ll go back home,” Dawn said. 

“Okay. Well, we’ll be back by midnight,” Willow said. “The library closes at eleven.” 

“Okay. Fine. Sounds good,” Spike said, and he grabbed Dawn by the hand, dragging her behind him as Willow and Tara headed off the other direction, to take the shorter route to the library. 

A few seconds later, before Spike and the others were even out of sight, Drusilla slunk out of the crypt, still naked. She gazed after Spike, dragging the little girl through the cemetery, and smiled. So that was how it was now, was it? Drusilla chuckled. Spike had never wanted a child before. Seemed she had a new card to play to win the game with her own darling boy.


	3. Wrong Again

“Knock knock?” 

“Who’s there?” Dawn asked. 

“Justin.”

“Justin who?”

“Justin the neighborhood, thought I’d come by!” Buffy Bot said happily. 

“Do you have to humor the bloody thing?” Spike demanded of Dawn. 

“I….” Dawn just looked sad. 

“Come on, Spike,” Buffy Bot said, turning to Spike. “They’re jokes. They’re funny.”

“Weren’t you the one who programmed in the knock-knock jokes?” Dawn asked. 

“No,” Spike said darkly. Warren had had a lot of weird ideas which had somehow held over from the programming of his previous sex-bot -- in fact, Spike was starting to wonder if he hadn’t just taken the April-bot and put the Buffy head over its frame. In which case, the idea of having sex with it made Spike feel even more disgusted than it had before. But he certainly hadn’t told Warren to program the thing with knock-knock jokes. It was worse than Harmony with its sense of humor. 

“Knock-knock,” Buffy Bot said. 

“Who’s there?” Dawn asked politely. 

“Ben.” 

“Ben who?” 

“Ben hoping for a chat?” Buffy Bot looked at Spike hopefully. 

Spike looked at her. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got one. Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?” 

“Empty.”

“Empty who?” 

“The world is a cold, empty void that sucks the heart out of you and leaves you a lifeless husk scrambling for a reason to exist.” 

There was a pause while the Buffy Bot processed this, then it laughed and laughed, patting Spike jovially on the shoulder. “Oh, that’s a good one, Spike. I love your sense of humor!” 

“Satisfied, bit?” Spike asked Dawn. 

Dawn’s head sank. She had the worst tendency to see the Buffy Bot as if it was a real person, with real feelings, and even a real (if stupid) sense of humor, and Spike couldn’t get her to see it any differently. “Can we put the thing upstairs now?” Spike asked again. “Doesn’t it need to charge up already?” He knew how the thing worked. He’d had a full tutorial on it before he’d gotten it. He knew it had a very limited battery life, couple of hours at most. 

“Yeah, okay. I’ll… I’ll take her upstairs.” 

The front door opened, and in bustled Xander, with Anya in tow. “Dawn, are you all right? Oh, Spike.” He stopped short. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” 

“Spike’s here?” Anya asked as she came in. “Oh. That means we don’t have to be here, right? Does that mean we can go home and have sex now?” 

“Anya, just cool it,” Xander said. “I got a message from Willow asking if we could watch you tonight. I didn’t know Spike was going to be here.” 

“Yeah, that was before we went to Spike,” Dawn said. “Willow and Tara are at the library, but they should be back -- oh, hi.” 

“Xander,” said Willow, coming in behind Anya. “Is there a problem? What are you doing here?” 

“You said you needed me,” Xander said.

“I said you should call me if you were free,” Willow said. “But you weren’t, so we picked up Spike.”

“But we came home early,” Tara said. “In case there was anything wrong.” 

“Is there anything wrong?” Anya asked. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong. I told you we were wasting our time and we should just stay home.” 

“No, there isn’t anything wrong,” Dawn said. 

“Why would you think there was something wrong?” Xander asked Tara. 

“Well, Spike was a little weird earlier, we just thought we’d come back early.”

“Is there something wrong, Spike?” Xander asked.

And suddenly they were all staring at him, and Spike wondered if his unasked-for tryst with Drusilla was somehow smeared all over his face. Did she leave a lipstick stain or something? 

“Knock-knock,” Buffy Bot said. 

“Oh, knock it off!” Spike snapped at her. 

“Oh, knock it off, who?” she asked, glitching in the format, and Spike’s fists clenched, itching to beat the thing to splinters. 

“Nothing’s wrong except that blasted bot,” Spike said. “Is it ready for combat yet?” 

“Not unsupervised,” Willow said. “Uh, Dawn? Why don’t you take it upstairs to recharge.” 

As Dawn led the bot up the stairs, Spike wondered if he oughtn’t to tell them that Drusilla was back in town. Especially when Willow waited until they were gone to ask, “There. Is there anything you need to tell us?” 

“What?” 

“Well, you were acting pretty weird earlier. I just wanted to make sure….”

Would it be so hard? Drusilla’s back in town. You’re going to need to be on your guard. But then he thought of the questions. How do you know? Why didn’t you say anything earlier? So why didn’t you kill her? Or better yet, So we know you can’t kill her, so we’ll do it for you. That idea stuck in his craw. If any of them were going to kill Dru, it was going to be him. 

“You just make sure to get that thing programmed right and clear, okay? Make it stop fawning at me and laughing at every bloody thing it thinks is a joke. In fact, tell it to lay off the knock-knock jokes altogether, yeah?” 

“Lay off the knock-knock jokes,” Xander and Willow said together, which made Anya look at them funny. 

“Well, I think they’re funny,” Anya said. 

“Well, they’re not Buffy!” Spike shouted. They looked startled, so he dialed his anger back a touch. “That’s the whole point of this thing, to make it Buffy, yeah?” 

“I’ll see what I can do,” Willow said. “Between school and patrolling, it’s hard to get the time to work on the subprograms.” She squared her shoulders. “I’ll do it.”

“Good. Great. See you later.” Spike left through the kitchen so he could stop and pick up a stake from the drawer there. He knew it was sheer folly to go back to his crypt without one. 

The liquor store was closed, or he’d have replaced his bottle of Everclear. He was completely sober for the first time in days, thanks to Dru leaving him chained up downstairs for however long that was -- a day? Two? -- and he wanted the sweet oblivion or at least welcome distraction that drunkenness lent him. Well, hopefully he had some booze at home that Dru hadn’t spiked with holy water. 

The place was dark when he got there. Dru hadn’t lit the candles, and hadn’t turned on the lights, and hadn’t cleared away the body, and didn’t seem to be there at all. Spike tried to sniff her out, but other than the fact that she left by the front entrance, Spike couldn’t follow her long, and didn’t really feel like it. Once he had it established that she wasn’t lurking in the crypt, he decided that was enough and he should just have a drink and sink back into oblivion. She’d either gotten what she wanted, or she hadn’t. If she hadn’t, she’d be back. If she had, she’d be gone. 

First, Spike knew he had to get rid of the body. Not a pleasant prospect. He didn’t feel like lugging it to the river. Finally he dragged it through the sewers to a path he rarely used, and left it down there for the rats to get at. At least it was far enough away that the Scoobies wouldn’t think it was his kill, which was all he really cared about. Then he went back to his crypt and checked his liquor. He poured a glass from one bottle and tested it with his thumb. When it didn’t burn him he drank it down, and checked another bottle. He’d had about five drinks this way before he finished, and took the last glass up stairs to watch telly while he drank it. 

It was getting on towards dawn before he saw it. It was scrawled on the wall in chalk or soft stone, a number and a name and a handful of random letters. 9874 Hwy 20 Lake Casitas. It wasn’t in a straight line or even particularly legible, but it was there, and it hadn’t been there before. Dru had left him an address. 

***

Buffy and he were dancing. Dancing in the way they always danced, which was mostly a fight, only in slow motion this time, coming together, touching, moving away again, back and forth, one then the other of them gaining the upper hand. He could almost hear music playing as he reached for her again, and her arm blocked his, turning him gently to the side, rolling against his waist, pushing him backwards. It was restful, and tears came to his eyes, and Buffy shook her head at him. “It’s time you got over me.” 

“I’ll never get over you,” he whispered. 

“What am I, an unclimbable mountain?” 

Spike moved forward and grabbed her, pushing her backwards until her block caught him and spun him away. “Unsurpassable, that’s what you are.” 

Her hand reached out and caught him by the side of the face, and he melted into her touch. “I’m gone, you know.”

Fear touched him at the words. “I know.” He grabbed her wrist and held it, forcing her against his skin. “What’s left?” 

“What was always left. Nothing’s changed. I never loved you.” 

“She did,” he said. And Buffy knew he meant Drusilla.

“She never loved you, either.”

“Don’t say that. If I don’t have love, what have I?” 

She said nothing, but Spike realized he was naked, had been fighting her naked, and he tried to pull her forward, to feel her body against his, but every move forward he made she countered until the movement carried him, and they were running, but she was facing him, the world passing by in a dark, angry blur. 

“Tell me what I have,” Spike begged, and Buffy ducked, and the momentum carried him forward and he fell over her, and found himself lying naked and chained on the floor of his crypt, and Drusilla arched over him. 

“You still have me, dearie,” Dru whispered, and then she kissed him, and Spike kissed her back, and Buffy watched from the sidelines, dressed in white, beautiful and perfect and too far away to touch in his chains. 

He woke gasping from the nightmare, throwing off the covers of his bed as if afraid he was chained underneath them. The only carryover from his dream was his nakedness, and he stopped and rubbed his forehead. He wished he could still live in dreams of his desire, like he used to while Buffy was alive, but the grief for her touched and poisoned everything, even his dreams. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, trying to calm himself, but he couldn’t. His teeth kept clenching and his body shuddered. Which was stupid, because what was so horrible about being fucked by Drusilla? Finally he fell back into what he always had to fall into, the meditation which had become his lifeline in the swell of grief. “I saved you. How did I save you?” He drew a blank for a long time, and finally said, “Was just faster, that’s all. I got there quicker, and I brought her down with me. I brought her down.” He paused. “And you were so grateful.” 

He stopped talking and envisioned Buffy kissing him in her gratitude, her lips sliding over his, the feel of her arms holding him. He closed his eyes, remembering her scent, and moved the fantasy to his crypt -- because everyone else took Dawn home and he could just focus on Buffy, Buffy, Buffy, the goddess of his desire, stripping his clothing away, kissing her way down his chest, digging her nails into him, and her teeth sharp, and her eyes yellow, and Dru had wormed her way into his fantasy, and he growled and sat up, because he was fucking awake, what the bloody hell was Dru doing there when he was awake to push her away? This was his damned fantasy! 

But he hadn’t pushed Drusilla away, had he? She’d walked off leaving a bloody calling card, and he hadn’t answered the call. He’d half expected her to invade his dreams, but for her to poison his fantasies, that galled him. He growled and threw himself out of bed. There was only one way to manage this, and that was to face it head on. He dressed and armed himself with a knife and a stake, trying to steel himself for the upcoming assault. Because he knew it would be. He knew this wouldn’t end easily. 

The drive out of Sunnydale was calming. The sun had only just left the horizon when he pulled himself into his poor, neglected DeSoto and drove down Highway 20, heading for Lake Casitas. He knew the town, vaguely. It was one of the handful of tiny places that dotted the coast between LA and Sunnydale. It had a couple stop signs and bordered a lake of the same name. It was rumored there was a demon population there, mostly nomads, planted between the lush feeding grounds of LA, and the demon-power enhancing aura of the hellmouth. It still touched the edges of the hellmouth’s influence, but only barely, and was out of the range of the slayer’s usual jurisdiction. A no-man’s land managed by no specific demon species, but frequented by many. There was no big bad in Lake Casitas. 

It took about half an hour of highway driving to get there, and when he neared the address he slowed below the speed limit to watch the numbers. He needn’t have bothered. There was nothing but farms, fields and derelict businesses until he spotted the blazing lights of a pub, which Spike knew instantly to be a demon hangout. Part of it was the aura. Part of it was the insignia and chains on the motorcycles outside. But the fact that the place was called, unabashedly, “El Demonio” sort of gave the game away. Spike pulled his car up to the side -- harder to jump in and escape, but less likely to get scratched up in a vandalism attempt -- and strode in with his hand in his pocket, fingering his stake. 

Dru was playing it safe. Spike didn’t want to start a fight here, and she’d know that. The place was full of demons, mostly lesser sorts, tarangs and blood rugens and a couple of leios, sharpening their claws on the bar. No sign of Drusilla, but there were so many scents from so many demons it was hard to tell if she’d been there. There were quite a number of vampires as well, but all minion types, bumpy-faced and dull-eyed, so Spike wasn’t intimidated. There were even two or three victims, either blasted on drugs or demon pheromones, one actually being held behind a table as she frequently tried to get away. She eyed him hopefully, but he didn’t care particularly, and the hope died in her eyes as the only human-faced visitor glanced over her. He strode up to the bar. Better to pretend to be a patron at first. “Blood and pepper,” he said. 

“We got veal, pig, and chicken. Human costs extra.” 

“Veal,” Spike said. A moment later a tumbler full of cold veal blood was sloshed in front of him. It smelled a little high, but hadn’t gone off yet. The bartender had left the pepper grinder on the table in front of him -- one of those plastic ones from the grocery store -- and Spike peppered his blood to taste. Wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great, either. They needed a better fridge, or a more reliable supplier. He wanted some booze, but he needed to be sober to deal with Dru. 

“Looking for a girl,” he said as he tossed a bill onto the bar. “Thin, long arms, dark hair. Vampire. Bit of an otherworldly look.”

“Oh, you mean the princess?” said the bartender, a shloff demon with long ears and his hair in tight braids which indicated his status, which was low. “She’s in the basement.” 

“Basement?” 

“She’s been expecting you,” the shloff said with an evil grin. “Might want to take it slow with her. She’s got powers.” 

“Don’t I know it,” Spike said. “Don’t underestimate me.”

“I’m not,” said the shloff. “Heard of you, too. Aren’t you big in Sunnydale?” 

“I don’t blare that around these days,” Spike said, unable to hide a smile at the notoriety. He was known in these parts, and he had been the big bad for a long time. That reputation still kept the vampires and several of the demons of Sunnydale regarding him with respect, and kept other big bads from trying to hone in on his territory much. He tried to keep a low profile now that he had his little trouble hurting humans, but he could still take demons, and did, and they knew it. He was glad to see his reputation spread to Lake Casitas. 

He downed his veal before taking the stairs the shloff had indicated, stake still in his pocket. The downstairs was quiet. It looked like a room reserved for private functions, bachelor parties and the like, half the size of the upper floor. The other half of the basement was probably storage. The music down here was muffled, and the floor carpeted in dark grey, to hide stains. There was also a line of coffins against one wall, crash space rented out to vampires trapped by the daylight, no doubt. And there was Drusilla, sitting at a table, playing what looked like Happy Families with three fledgelings. 

“There’s my man,” she said without looking at the door. “Say hello to Daddy, boys.” 

The boys all stood up and took on defensive stances, heads held high and hands in fists, like a bunch of puffed up gorillas. Drusilla, however, finally stood in wave of seductive grace, beaming up at Spike with a bright red smile. “You came, my darling boy. So wonderful to see you again.”

“I came to end this, Dru,” Spike said.

“End what?” 

“This. You and me. It’s over.” He pulled out the stake. “I’ll do it quick if you’d like, or slow if you’d prefer. But we’re done.” 

Dru laughed. “We’re never done. Like the sun and the moon and the stars we circle and circle, but we always circle back.” She reached out and touched the end of his stake with one finger, circling around him like a dancer. “Come along, Spike my love. When I’ve found us this pretty little lair all ready for us, and little boys all ready to run at your feet. Take a knee, boys!” she announced. 

The minions glanced at each other, not mindless automatons, but she had enough power over them that they finally obeyed, each going to a knee in honor of her request. “Do you like them, Spike?” Dru asked, finally dancing around to his front again, her hand sliding down his arm. 

“Did you make them yourself?” Spike asked. 

“I’ve forgotten,” Dru said. “Maybe one or two. But they’re not like you, my boy, my prince, my knight. My love.” She leaned forward to kiss him, and Spike slipped his head backward to avoid her. But he wasn’t grabbing for her, wasn’t pressing the stake to her heart. 

Dru backed away and leaned back on one of the tables, her lipsticked mouth bright against her pale face. “I know what you’re feeling, Spike. She wormed her way inside you and burned you from the inside out. Love. Not the real love, of blood boiling in your veins, but the toxic love of the darkness for the sunshine. But the sun only banishes the darkness, Spike. You need blood love, not sun love. You’re filled with ashes. You need the blood to bring you back.” 

“Dru, you told me this before, right as you sent me off without you. You expect me to forgive and forget?”

“I’m forgiving a stake to the heart, aren’t I, pet?” Dru snapped, a little harshly for forgiveness. Then she softened again. “She’s gone, I’m here, and I have our new kingdom all chosen for us. Beat them down a little and they’ll follow us like ducklings. They’re aching for a strong master to lead them. When the nomads leave, when the wanderers travel, there’s nothing here but headless horsemen, aching for a head. We can be the head. The princess and her knight. They’re already ready for you. Just reach out and take it.” 

“Wait,” Spike said. “You’re telling me you’ve scoped this place out as a new lair, with new minions, just for me?” 

“Of course,” Dru said. 

Spike was actually touched. Usually he had been the one who had to scope out the lair, he had been the one who had to select and beat the minions into submission, he had been the one taking care of Drusilla. The only time it hadn’t been the case was when he’d been in the wheelchair, and completely incapable before his vampire powers had repaired his spinal column. His head tilted. “You think me injured.” 

“Of course you are,” Drusilla said patiently. “What else is grief but a human injury? ‘Tisn’t a demon illness. She’s made you too human, filled you up with sunshine and daisies and dreams and then snatched them away by burning you inside.” 

Spike chewed the idea over in his head. Buffy would have hated it. But then, if he did have a new kingdom, with new followers and the strength that that lent him, he could protect Dawn better than ever, couldn’t he? If he’d had a big enough army, he could have kept Glory at bay. Or at least those buggering knights and the madmen and her demon guards. 

A new vision entered his head. Buffy, alive, saved by Spike’s army of vampires and demons, those who jumped when he said frog and bowed when he growled. To be the big bad again, to protect those he loved. A new weapon. A new life. 

Spike shook his head. “I still have my little problem, Dru.” 

“And I still have the little solution,” Drusilla said. She glided across the room to one of the coffins and opened it. She pulled out a man, shirtless, tied up with ropes, who struggled when Dru first opened the box but stilled as she stared into his eyes. He was young, no more than seventeen -- veal, as Spike would have called him. She took Spike’s hand and drew him close. Why wasn’t he fighting her? “Come here, Spike. Take a drink.” 

“I can’t,” Spike said, the temptation and the regret coloring his voice. “Not unless you kill him first.” More dead blood. What was the point? 

“Balderdash,” Drusilla said, “dash, dash. Come and take it.” She propped the unresisting victim against the wall and held her thumbnail to his artery. “Come and drink.” And she sliced deep. Blood gushed, spurting out with the young man’s pulse, splash, splash, splash, and Spike’s mouth watered as he realized the chip wasn’t going off, and the blood was just pouring, and all he’d need to do was drink, like from a watering fountain, and his fangs came up, and he was still honoring his promise, he hadn’t broken his promise, and he could protect Dawn this way, he could be strong, he could be the master, he could have his blood and keep her too, and Dru’s hand was on his head, and she pushed him down, and damn it, damn him, he let her, because in the end he always let her lead him down these paths, and he opened his mouth, and the blood rushed over his tongue, and he closed his lips over the gushing, and he swallowed and swallowed. 

He couldn’t suckle, because that made his head twinge, and he couldn’t bite, because that was going to make him scream, but he could swallow, and he could take the blood that the man’s heart was gifting to him, just gifting, and he licked and kissed at the blood and the flesh and the power he could feel filling him until the blood stopped spurting, and Spike’s stomach was full of it, full for the first time in for-bloody-ever, and he pulled away from the corpse, and glared down at Dru with his eyes yellow and scheming, and Dru threw the body to the minions who had been watching saying, “Eat up, boys,” and they took the body to suck away all the dead blood, while Spike was left with his prize, his princess, his Drusilla, his own. 

He caught her by the waist and lifted her onto the lid of the coffin and kissed her with his bloodstained mouth, and then he twisted her, because he needed to bite, and he could bite her, so he did, he bit her throat, and more blood filled his mouth, demon blood, her blood, his dark mother’s blood, and she squealed and dug her nails into his back, and that was good too, because they were always hurting each other, and she spread her legs and wrapped them around him, and then Spike was fumbling for his clothes, and then he was fucking Drusilla on the coffin lid, and she grunted with pain and pleasure, and the blood and the sensation blotted out the grief for a while, better than booze, better than pretending he’d saved her, just made it all go away. 

Blood and power and passion. It made it all go away.


	4. Right Again

Spike bashed his fist into the demon’s face, causing an audible crunch. The blue-skinned creature’s head snapped back, then he rallied, kicking out at Spike. The blow connected with Spike’s thigh, but didn’t faze him. He kneed up, adding a blow to the demon’s ribs for good measure, then whirled and elbowed him down. It sprawled, grunted, then staggered back to its feet, looking shaken, but not beaten. It swung at Spike, who sidestepped and grabbed the creature’s arm. He dragged it half down, flung himself up, and landed hard on its back. The last creature Spike had done this move on died. This one did not, but it fell to the floor of the pub and stayed there. 

Spike rounded on the rest of the demons who had been watching and flexed his arm. “So you were saying?” he said casually to the female who had presented the blue guy as her champion. 

“All right,” the girl said. “I guess you and your girl keep the side room.”

“Too right we do,” Spike said. “Any other challengers for the night?” 

There was a general dissent as no one else wanted to fight Spike tonight. He hadn’t had to do too many of these fights. Most of the patrons of the bar were nomads, who would clear out if they didn’t like sharing the space with a big bad, or would shrug and ignore the current pub politics for the day or two they hung around before they headed out again. The few he’d had to fight against he’d won easily, mostly those who thought to claim Drusilla or his minions -- whose numbers had swelled to twelve in the last week -- or who wanted the side room in the basement for their own. The side room held the double coffin, and currently housed several of Drusilla’s dolls. Drusilla didn’t like to share a dorm. 

“That’s my big bad,” Drusilla whispered from her place at the booth. She sat easily with a bottle of wine on one side, and a middle aged man semi-conscious on her other. Spike sat down heavily, a sneer on his face. He’d gotten the shloff barkeeper to add some proper punk music to the juke box, but the majority of the demons there tended to prefer more hard rock. Another song flared up, and the tension of the fight faded as the music eased everyone down. 

“There you are, sweetheart,” Spike said. “Shouldn’t have any trouble for the rest of the night.” 

Dru lifted the bottle and forced another swig of wine into her victim, who took it docilely. “Good of you to take care of it for me, pet,” she said. “But you’re not content.” 

Spike shrugged. “It’ll be fine,” Spike said. “I got some business I’m not through with in Sunnydale, is all.”

“And that’s why you’re leaving?” 

“I’ll be back,” Spike said. 

These last three days had been like a heady dream. Dru kept him flush with blood, with sex, with violence, with booze, and any time one distraction flagged, she was ready with another one. He’d barely had time to think, but it had been too many days since he’d checked on Dawn, and he knew he had to. He was fairly sober, he’d just quashed a potential rival, and Dru’s victim wouldn’t be properly ready for an hour or more. 

“Have a bite to eat before you go, love,” Drusilla said. 

“He’s not ready yet.” 

“Just sneak a bit before he’s done marinating,” Dru said, and she stabbed a thumbnail into the man’s arm. He grunted, but a look into Dru’s eyes and he sank back into dreams. Dru held the wine glass beneath the stream of blood and they both watched as it poured until it clotted and stopped, Dru having not gotten any major arteries. She passed the half full glass of blood over, and Spike tasted it. It wasn’t near perfected yet, the wine only barely in the bloke’s bloodstream. Still, it was blood, fresh and hot, and Spike swigged it down. Diminishing returns, of course. After three days of fresh human blood, it didn’t have the same effect as it had when she’d first seduced him back onto it. He just felt contentedly full. 

He sat up and kissed Dru deeply on the lips before heading for the door. 

“Come back,” Dru said. She helped the victim to more wine. “I’ll keep supper warm for you.” 

Spike’s mouth watered. The wine marinade was a special recipe he hadn’t had in _years._ He was looking forward to it. But he _had _to check on Dawn. 

Licking his lips to get the last traces of blood from them, he headed out to the DeSoto and drove into the night. 

Sunnydale was just like he left it. He drove straight to Buffy’s place, vaguely remembering that there was some meeting he was supposed to have with the others. He strode up the porch, wondering why he was wasting time with this, and opened the door. 

_Bam_. The place reeked of fresh blood. Young, strong blood, mostly female. He’d been off it for so long he had barely registered human as food anymore, but these days he was hot with it, and he was hard pressed not to vamp up instantly. Damned chip. He could slash his way through these blasted birds in five minutes, but instead he knew he’d have to behave himself. And anyway, these were friends, such as they were. The first instinct to kill them wasn’t something he had to indulge. 

He stretched his neck, flexing his jaw to calm the demon impulses, then came all the way in. 

Only to find Xander glaring at him. “Where the hell have you been?” 

Spike blinked slowly at him. Dru would have a really fun time tearing apart those lanky arms of his. “What are you on about?” Spike asked. 

“I mean, where the hell have you been? We had a meeting scheduled last night. I went looking for you. By which I mean I went all the way to your crypt, expecting to have to pour you out of the bottle you’d wedged yourself into.” 

“Wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Spike said evenly. 

“No, you weren’t anywhere!” Xander snapped. “I had to--”

But Xander didn’t get the chance to complain about what he’d had to do, because Willow came down the stairs. “Oh, I’m glad you’re back, Spike,” she said. “We were getting worried about you. You were nowhere to be found, not at your place, not at Willy’s, not… well, we didn’t know where else to look for you, actually, but you weren’t anywhere.” 

“I had sommat to do,” Spike said.

“Did you forget about our meeting?” Willow asked. 

“Thought it was tonight,” Spike said. “Far as I was concerned, I was right on time.” 

“I thought it would be something like that,” Willow said. “Well, the bot’s ready. Are you?”

“The bot? Wait, what?” 

“The Buffy Bot. We were going to take it out for a real slay finally. But it doesn’t want to go out unless you tell it to. I tried, but ran into a subroutine it says you implemented, that it’s not to go out to slay unless you say it’s okay, and--”

“Right, right,” Spike said. He had instilled that rule in the bot after it had run off on its own and got caught by Anya. It didn’t seem to always stick, but when it did it was a firm rule, and clearly he’d have to tell it it was okay. “Fine, whatever. Bring it down here. We’ll go on patrol.” 

“Tara?” Willow called up. “You can bring it down now.” 

Tara and Dawn came down with the Buffy Bot in tow. Spike spared half a smile for Dawn, but she smelled like Sunday dinner, and when she came up for a hug he held her at arm’s length. “All right, let’s get this travesty over with,” he said. “Who’s on patrol and who’s staying with the little bit?” 

“I was going to stay with Dawn,” Tara said. “Willow’s with you so she can work on the bot.” 

“Right.” Spike pushed himself toward the door. “Come on, Buffy, you’re going on patrol.”

“I am? Okay, time to slay,” the Buffy Bot announced, and Xander caught up with him just as they headed for the back door. 

“What’s with you?”

“I’m coming with you,” Xander said. 

Spike really didn’t want to deal with Xander right now. “Why?” 

“Just think it’s a good idea,” Xander said. “More hands, you know.” 

Spike let it go and walked with the bot, but before they were halfway to the nearest graveyard Spike heard Xander and Willow muttering. 

“You didn’t have to come. I’m just working on the programing. I don’t think we’ll find any vampires, there are no suspicious fresh graves.” 

“I just wanted to come along to make sure Spike didn’t get all kissy-face with the bot when your back was turned,” Xander hissed, not nearly quietly enough for Spike not to hear him. 

“Why don’t _you_ take the machine for a spin?” Spike asked him, calling back. He surprised Xander, who blushed. “After all, it’s only a little less desperate for a shag than your demon trull.” 

“Did you just rag on Anya?” Xander asked. 

“Xander, don’t,” Willow begged. 

“Don’t? Why don’t you tell _him_ to don’t?” Xander asked. 

“Because you started it,” Willow said. “You know he doesn’t do that anymore.” 

“Not with that thing,” Spike said. “Hurry up, it’s like being tied to a gravestone, lugging you two along behind me.” He doubled his pace and the two humans had to trot to keep up with him and the bot. 

The cemetery was a grave disappointment. There was no indication of any newborn activity or meetings of older vampires. Spike didn’t really want to run into any, in case word of his attempt to rebuild a gang got back to the Scoobies. He didn’t want them to know until he’d gotten a big enough following to make it a real viable option for protecting Dawn. He was fairly sure he couldn’t convince the witches to just let him take Dawn, and Xander would be against him no matter what. He had to have enough to make argument an impossibility. 

How many minions that would be, Spike was having trouble deciding. He didn’t have a grand plan, not right now. Mostly he was using this time to put himself back into a space where he was strong enough to be a real threat. He needed Drusilla for that for now, but given enough time…. 

“All right, so let’s test this thing,” Spike said. 

“What do you mean?” 

“You ready for a fight, sweetheart?” Spike asked the bot. 

“Of course I am, Spike. Show me your moves.”

“Gonna have to catch me.” He dove behind a crypt and made a break for it. The bot chased him, but lost him quickly. This happened again and again. “You’re going to have teach the damned thing to follow!” Spike said to Willow after the fourth time he’d lost it, and it started wandering in circles. 

“It doesn’t have Buffy’s instincts,” Willow said, holding her finger in front of the bot’s nose to check where its eyes followed. “I don’t know why it does the circles thing, though. Maybe we should start herding vampires to it?” 

“I’m done,” Spike said. “It’s not ready.” 

“It will be ready,” Willow said. “It just needs some more training. You got it to hunt vampires on its own, didn’t you?” 

“That was before you buggered up its programming.” 

“By making it less skeevy,” Xander said. “Which is what you asked her to do in the first place.”

“I should have known better than to rely on little red parlor tricks and wanker boy to do anything right.”

“Like you can talk!” Xander said. “You aren’t even around!” 

“Excuse me?” Spike asked, taking a step toward Xander. 

“Like we said, we looked everywhere. What were you up to? Getting drunk in some slum while Dawn’s counting on you.” 

“I don’t have to answer to you,” 

“Well, we should have known better than to trust an evil vampire to show up when he says he will.”

“When I say I’ll do something, I do it,” Spike said. “I said I’d protect Dawn. I’m going to do it.” 

“You don’t care about Dawn,” Xander said. “If you did, you’d have been here last night to work with the bot, rather than off gallivanting about with your demon buddies, getting drunk as a--”

Spike’s hand shot out and he grabbed Xander by the shoulder. Hard. “Listen up, monkey-boy,” Spike said darkly. 

“No, you listen up,” Xander said, shrugging off Spike’s arm. “Is that supposed to intimate me? Because you’re about as frightening as a scarecrow.” Spike’s eyes narrowed. Xander sure _smelled_ afraid. That was where all the bravado was coming from, anger at being scared. “When we tell you to come to a meeting, we expect you to be there. I don’t expect to have to go traipsing all over Sunnydale looking for a toothless bloodsucker with a drinking problem. You said you’d help us, and we trusted you, so you’d better shape up or--” Spike turned away. Xander grabbed his shoulder and turned him back. “Or Buffy would be very disappointed in you!” 

Four days ago, that would have been below the belt. Spike probably would have walked off. Today Spike was so awash with blood that the emotional blow felt muffled, and he was barely even annoyed. “I’m not your bleeding lapdog,” he said low, in a tone calculated to remind Xander exactly how many people he’d killed. “I show up when I choose.”

“Is that before, or after Dawn gets eaten?” Xander asked. 

Spike hit him. The blow rebounded in his head, hurting him far worse than it hurt Xander, but Spike really hadn’t been able to help it. “Ow!” said Xander. 

“Ah!” groaned Spike. 

“That’s enough, you two!” Willow came and shoved them both apart. “We need to work together.” 

“He hit me!” Xander complained. 

“You were being an arse,” Spike muttered through the residual headache. 

“I’m just telling the truth,” Xander snapped. 

“Both of you, stop it! Spike, we didn’t know where you were last night. Xander was worried.” 

“Worried?” 

“People can hurt you. We wondered if the Knights of Byzantium or something else had come after you again. There was blood in your crypt.”

Spike glanced up at them, the headache finally receding. “I, uh, I spilled some stuff from the butcher.”

“Well, I tried out that new locating spell I found, but I couldn’t get it to work,” Willow said. “And Xander wondered if you were kidnapped again, and said we didn’t have Buffy around to save you.” 

“I was just wondering,” Xander said, looking awkward. “Not as if I was worried or anything. I should have known you were just off getting drunk.” 

Spike didn’t know what to say, whether to be touched or annoyed. Besides… dinner was probably ready at the pub. “Are we done?” he asked. 

“Uh, yeah,” Willow said. “I’ll figure out what’s causing the circling and we can try again tomorrow night.” 

“Not tomorrow night,” Spike said, leading them back through the cemetery.

“Why not?” 

“I got things to do.”

“Like what?” Xander asked. 

“Demons to feel out, the underground to tap. You know. Make sure no one’s scheming for the little bit. No one else can do that, can they?” 

They knew this was true. They weren’t as well connected to the demon underground as Spike. 

“So, not tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I’m done.” 

“When will that be?” Xander asked. 

“When I’ve done!” Spike roared at him, and picked up the pace. 

***

“Are you worried?” Dawn asked when there was a commercial break. 

“What about?” Tara hit mute on the TV remote and looked at her. 

“Spike seemed… I don’t know. Distant,” Dawn said. 

“Spike always seems a little… off,” Tara said. “He is a vampire, after all. Not really human.”

“Well, neither am I,” Dawn said. 

“You’re human enough,” Tara said. “Spike’s okay.” 

“We were all so worried yesterday, and now he’s just back, and no one says anything?” 

“I think Xander said plenty.” 

“But not about how worried we were,” Dawn said. “Spike's sensitive. We should be nice to him.” 

“Spike’s been a murderous demon for over a hundred years,” Tara pointed out. “I think he can take care of himself.” 

Dawn frowned, and then looked up. “They’re back already.” 

“That was quick.” Tara looked at the time. “I wasn’t expecting you for another hour, at least,” she said as Willow led the bot up the stairs. 

“We ran into a glitch,” Willow said. “Or two,” she added as Xander came in with a fat lip. 

“What happened?” Tara asked. 

“Spike’s fist,” Xander said ruefully.

“I thought he couldn’t do that,” Tara said. 

“Sometimes it’s worth it,” Spike said darkly from the kitchen. 

Dawn unfolded herself from the couch and went in with Spike while the others whispered between themselves. 

“Don’t bother,” Spike said. “You brassed because I blew you off, too?” 

“Actually, I was just worried,” Dawn said. “The others were, too.” 

“Not according to them. They’re in there now whispering about whether they really need me or not.” 

“We need you,” Dawn said. “They know we need you.” 

“_You_ need me,” Spike said. “I don’t give a damn about them. Like it matters.” He turned with a shrug and headed for the kitchen door. 

“Hey, wait,” she said. “I got you something.” She went to the fridge and opened it up. “I went to the butcher and got some fresh blood this morning. I didn’t know what kind of state you’d be in if we found you. Either hurt or tired or… well. I don’t know how much money you have. Anyway, I thought you might need this?” 

She held up a mason jar full of blood. Basic steer’s blood from the butcher, but it was fresh, and she’d gotten it for him herself. “Thanks, niblet,” he said. He took the blood from her and then held it awkwardly. 

“Aren’t you going to drink some?” 

“Nah, you don’t want to see that,” he said, and she frowned. It hadn’t stopped him before. “But ta, really.”

“Is… is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Spike said with a sigh. 

“I was worried about you,” she said. “I spent the whole night worried.” 

“I know.” 

“I kept imagining you chained up or beaten or trapped by the sun or something. And what with what happened when Glory caught you, and we… we don’t have Buffy now to save you… and I didn’t know if any of the others…. I mean, Willow said she’d cast spells and get you back, but you didn’t show up on the map, and I knew you wouldn’t… I mean you wouldn’t leave Sunnydale.” 

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Spike snapped. 

She teared up. “I thought you’d gone.” 

“Wouldn’t do that,” Spike said. 

“Because you promised Buffy,” Dawn said. 

She expected him to tense up at that, or tear up himself, because that’s what usually happened when she mentioned Buffy’s promise, but all he did was nod. “Yep. Because of that.” He held up the blood for a moment with a strange expression on his face. She moved forward for a hug -- and he pulled away, setting the blood down on the counter. “Cheers, little bit. You know, I’ll see you later.”

“Spike?” Dawn asked, but he had already slipped out the door. She went to the kitchen door and watched after him. He disappeared into the bushes with a wave of his coat, not even turning around to check she’d closed the door. 

Spike wasn’t crying with her. He wasn’t trembling, he wasn’t clenching his fists, he wasn’t pale and half drunk and pining for a love that overwhelmed Dawn even as it had frightened Buffy. Spike didn’t seem to be grieving at all suddenly. Maybe he was healing, as everyone said time would do… or maybe… maybe there was something very, very wrong. 


	5. Sad Again

There were dozens of them. Whenever you thought the stream would end, more vampires would appear -- behind fences, out of manholes, down from the branches of trees. More and more and more of them, hungry, slavering, yellow eyes glaring, fangs bared, fists raised, ready for a fight. 

They were soulless, untamed, hungry and angry, and Spike strode before them like a colossus. They were frightened of him, more frightened of him than they were of the god before them, who’d held Dawn in her grasp well before she’d even been brought up that tower. “That’s enough play time,” Spike announced. “That tasty niblet’s mine.” 

“Do you think I’ll let you take my key?” Glory asked with scorn. “I’m more fantastic than anything you can throw at me.”

“Let’s just see, yeah?” And Spike made a gesture, and his boys descended, with strict instructions to keep Dawn alive and just go for the god. And Spike moved through the writhing pit as Glory tossed his minions about like crackers, because she was a god, but the hordes protecting her, they were easily dismissed, the madmen and the scabby hobbit demons, they all disappeared beneath the throng. And Spike pushed through and got hold of Dawn and caught a glimpse of Doc about to take her up the ladder, and he shouted, “To me, boys!” and three vampires attacked him, and Spike smacked him in the face, and the demon sorcerer went down, and Spike crushed his ribcage, and he had Dawn, he had Dawn, he’d saved her, though his minions were fallen or dust.

And then out of the dust stepped Buffy, troll hammer in hand, clean and perfect as an avenging angel. Glory was winded from the fight with all the vampires, winded and tired, and Buffy barely had to work up a sweat to fight the god down. She fought the god, and it sank, and turned into Ben, and Spike knew what to do then, and he decided he had no chip, because that would just make this too complicated, so he had no chip, and he moved in and bit Ben on the throat and just sucked his life away while Buffy collected Dawn and moved off into the sunrise.

Leaving Spike alone with what was left of his crawling minions, because he just couldn’t imagine her loving him this time, not after he’d killed and turned countless innocents to serve at his beck and call. But he’d saved her. He’d saved Buffy. He’d saved her. 

He still couldn’t sleep. 

Spike raised himself out of the double coffin and hopped up into the storage room. The room seemed mad as Drusilla, as half of it was lace and satin dolls and the other half was stacks of paper towels and cleaning products for the bar upstairs, but it was the only bit of privacy available in this lair, and it was hard enough fighting to keep it. How long Dru had been planning this, Spike didn’t know, but it had been long enough she’d established a firm presence in this little storage room. 

He strode through the party room, but Dru wasn’t there. Some shouting and whistles told him something was up. He drifted through the demons, who parted a little to let him through -- he was already something big here -- and found Drusilla at a table with minions holding the shoulders of no less than four victims. Dru hadn’t subdued them. They were terrified, mussed and creased, probably motorists or travelers who had stopped for gas or stupidly tried the demon pub for something to eat. There was a bottle in the center of the table, and as Spike watched she reached out and spun it. When it pointed at a victim, they’d scream, and the demon holding it would take a bite from their throat or arm. After the bite they’d move off and let another demon take over. 

Spike watched three revolutions, waiting as a vampire or demon took bite after bite, the screams growing louder with each attack. “Dru, love, don’t you think this is a bit much?” 

Drusilla looked back at him, and for a moment he read only resentment in her eyes. Then the flash of irritation passed, and she smiled languidly. “Spike, sweetness. Thought you were resting.” 

Spike regarded her, made suspicious by the resentment he’d seen in her face. “This is loud, Dru. Too many victims and we draw too much attention.” 

“They came to us, darling,” Dru said, standing up. “Walked right in.” 

“Exactly. They could have an itinerary and people who miss them. Did you check? They might even have cell phones, people can track those things.”

“Spike, sweet.” She rubbed her hands down his chest. “Why so grumpy?” 

Another scream from the table caught Spike’s ears. _Buffy walking away with Dawn, leaving him behind_. “We don’t need to play these games. Kill them and be done with it.” 

For a brief second Drusilla trembled. Fury flashed over her expression, and he almost caught her eyes flickering yellow. Then in an uncharacteristic gesture she lowered her hands, forced the anger and the madness from her face, and smiled prettily. “Whatever you say, Spike.” He’d expected her to go into a tantrum. That was the Dru he knew, who would fight him for her petty joys, who’d go crazy if he brought the wrong flowers. This tightly controlled façade wasn’t something he understood. It was starting to concern him. “Don’t you want one for yourself?” she asked.

He did, but no, he didn’t. Fresh blood would just confuse him more right now. “No,” he said. He took Dru’s arm and turned to the demons. “No more screams. Getting too loud up here.” 

“Let them keep, boys,” Drusilla said reluctantly. “We’ll finish our game later.” 

One of the victims sobbed at that. 

As the demons tied and gagged the victims, Dru led Spike across the bar to the jukebox. She kicked it and it started playing Stevie Nicks. Spike couldn’t help but grin. Sometimes Dru was simply magical. She danced sinuously down against him, and Spike tilted his head back. _And Buffy walked away from him_. “I don’t like you playing games like that without me, pet,” Spike said. “Makes for a bad precedent. I’m supposed to be in charge.” 

“The boys need something to keep them distracted,” Dru said. “They’re bored. We should take them on holiday.” 

Spike knew he should. They were too close to Sunnydale, and he didn’t have a strong enough grip on them. They knew he didn’t hunt. They didn’t know the reason, but the fact that he didn’t take his own victims was becoming a known characteristic of his, and eventually the demons would start asking why. And when they found out, he’d have to fight twice as hard to keep them. The vampires he was probably safe from -- particularly Drusilla’s half-mad, weak-willed, devoted fledges -- but the other demons, the ones who didn’t really like vampires, it was just a matter of time before they grabbed a bunch of human thugs to beat the Big Bad out of Spike. 

His plan to use his newly found army to protect Dawn was starting to crumble under the logistics of it all. First he’d have to get Dawn to accept it. Drusilla could probably help there, if she’d deign to use her thrall, but first he’d have to persuade Dru, and he hadn’t even told Dru about Dawn yet. And he knew he couldn’t persuade Dru unless he was strong enough, and he couldn’t be strong enough without a large enough base of followers, but… it went round and round and round in his head. 

He was coming to the conclusion that he might have to kill the Scoobies to get this to work. And Buffy really wouldn’t like him killing the Scoobies. Neither would Dawn, for that matter. Ways to kill them flickered faintly in his head -- fire, deadfalls, some judicious tampering with Xander’s car -- but only faintly. He hadn’t really decided on doing it yet, and anyway, Drusilla was talking. He turned his attention back to her. 

“We should go, Spike, we should leave,” she was continuing. “Do you remember Brazil? Or Trinidad? Or New Orleans, we could go back to New Orleans, Spike.”

“I remember Brazil,” Spike said. “You went running off to parties and making out with chaos demons.” 

“And you ran off to Sunnydale to your sunshine princess,” Dru countered. “We both went off the path.” 

Spike turned her to the music, gazing into her eyes. “Oh, there’s a path now, is there?” 

“Only one amongst the thorns,” Dru said, and her eyes went distant as she did with her visions. “One narrow footpath through the thorns and over the bridge and down into the valley of shadows.” She closed her eyes, and such pain ran across her brow. “Only one way out of the flames. Oh.” She shuddered in his arms a moment and then blinked back to gaze into his eyes. “And the path’s not here, Spike. We need to leave this place. We need to take the children and leave. You need to leave it behind.” 

“Not ready yet,” Spike told her, speaking low and earnest. “We will leave, Dru, I swear it. But not yet. Not quite yet.” 

“What do you still need, Spike?” Dru asked. “You have the blood and the bodies and your beautiful princess. What more do you need?” Dru ran her nails down the back of his neck, scratching gently across his flesh, her eyes bright and deep. “Tell me.”

Dawn tickled in his head. He had to figure out how to manage Dawn. But he didn’t want to say it. “I’m just not ready,” he said, looking away from Dru’s eyes. “There’s still stuff I have to sort out.” 

“Like the slayer’s toys?” Drusilla whispered. 

Spike’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?” 

“You come back covered in them, and you expect me not to notice? Come on, Spike. She hasn’t left you yet.” 

A heavy feeling clutched at his heart. “Don’t talk about her.” 

“But Spike--”

Spike grabbed Dru hard by the arm, digging his nails into her flesh. “Don’t. Talk about her.” 

“What about _them_?” she snarled, ripping herself away. “They don’t care about you. You don’t care about them. Just leave, and let it all burn.” 

“I’m not ready yet!” Spike roared at her. 

The demons in the bar turned to watch them in their row. Spike expected her to fly at him, try to rip his eyes out. He expected a fight, one that he would win, and then Dru would back down and be kittenish again. Indeed, a tantrum flickered in Dru’s eyes, he could read it there. But then she quashed it down. It was strange watching her do that. She’d never been able or willing to do it before. “Then we’ll wait until things are ready,” she said evenly. “Wait until the walker chooses the path. Is that what you want?” 

“What I want,” Spike said, conscious of being watched, “is to be obeyed, not questioned for every decision I make. I say we’re not leaving yet. You say, yes, Daddy.” 

Dru smiled, amused. “Yes, Daddy,” she said, and then came back in for her dance. “The sun is risen. I thought you were sleepy, baby.” 

“Couldn’t sleep,” he confessed. 

“Would you rather sleep with me?” she asked. 

“Always,” he whispered into her ear. 

She sensuously drifted away from him, still holding his hand, and led him down the stairs, to the sounds of salacious whoops from the bar. She led him down through the party room, into the storage basement, and had him help lift her into the double coffin. There she proceeded to seduce him, deliberately and, he felt, calculatedly. He let do it, let her ride him, trying to feel nothing but her, though it was starting to pall. He felt himself going soft and faked an orgasm before she realized he was losing it. He didn’t know if she bought it, but it didn’t matter. Mostly he just wanted her to stop. Then he held her down and finished her off with his fingers, which did make her purr like a kitten, so he got more enjoyment from that than he had from her trying to get him off. At least he didn’t have to fake that. 

When they were done he readjusted his clothes and held Dru close, breathing in her deadly scent, feeling her cool body against his. It was important to have someone to hold. The one thing he still sometimes thought about with the Buffy Bot was the idea of having something to hold as he tried to sleep. If it would just shut up, he could pretend… but no, he couldn’t pretend it was Buffy anymore. It was something she’d hated. 

But Dru was something she’d hated, too. 

Ugh, whatever, he needed to sleep. When had he last slept? Not yesterday. The day before? Dru had kept him so busy…. That was it, think about sleep. Try not to think about Buffy. You saved her, anyway. There was nothing wrong. She was saved, and now he could sleep, hold on to someone and sleep, and…. 

_And Buffy walked away from him_._ She walked away and left him behind, and went into her house, and he tried to follow, but the seal was back up, he was bounced right back into the street. “You said you loved me,” she snapped._

_“I do.” _

_“You say you love me, and then you just dive back into the evil again?” _

_“How else can I protect her?”_

_“I trusted you. I believed in you. I told you I was counting on you.”_

_“To protect her, you said. Well, this is how I can protect her! There’s too much, it was too big, Glory had too many minions, too many powers. This is what I am, Buffy! This is what I have!”_

_“I should have known I couldn’t rely on you. I should have known you’d just go right back to it.” _

_“I’ll do whatever I have to do to protect her.” _

_“Who’s going to protect her from you, Spike? Who’s going to teach her how to be a good person? What’s going to make me proud of her? How can she live the way I want her to live? With a bunch of vampires draining victims all around her? With Drusilla ripping people apart? I trusted you.” _

_“You _can_ trust me! I saved you!” _

_“Not like this. I wouldn’t want it like this.” _

_“Like it matters! What difference does it make?” _

_“I need you to save her soul, not just her body. You’ve broken your promise.” Buffy’s voice was full of scorn. “You’ve broken it, and I hate you.” She started closing the door with contempt. “You’re not a man. You’re just an evil soulless monster.” The door shut. _

_“Buffy! _Buffy!” _Spike pounded on the door. “Buffy! Buffy! Don’t! Don’t leave me, Buffy!”_

“Buffy. Buffy.”

A sharp blow to his face woke him from the nightmare. 

“Still?” Drusilla demanded. 

“What?” Spike was disoriented, but he realized he’d been talking in his sleep, calling out for Buffy. 

“Drown her out!” Drusilla demanded, shaking him. “Drown her out!” 

Spike held Dru’s eyes for a long moment, trying to muster up anger, to tell her that he was getting over her, that it wasn’t Dru’s place to be angry about this, but then he broke. He’d been blanketing it in blood and booze and sex, but it had never gone away. “I can’t,” he breathed. Sobs wracked his chest, striking as hard and suddenly as a blow. “I can’t, I can’t, Dru.” He clutched her tightly. “Help me. Please, please, help me.” 

Dru grabbed his head and stared into his eyes. “Look at me,” she insisted. “Be in me.” He knew she was doing it this time, she wasn’t even hiding it, and he let her, because what did it matter? Hoping even for some kind of thrall that would take this pain away, would drive Buffy from his head, from his heart, from his being, was the only frail hope he had left. But after a few moments all that happened was that Drusilla growled low and threw him away, so his head knocked the side of the coffin. “You’ve grown too blasted strong.”

Spike wiped the tears from his face. “I don’t understand.” 

“I could do it once. Take all the pain away and wrap it in a blanket, make you forget it ever existed,” she whispered, petting his head. “You were my own little babe then, and the only mother you needed, and what did it matter if you had no other? But you were so much softer then, new and young. Now you’re hard and strong and you still taste of ashes! Gah!”

“Just hold me,” Spike begged.

Dru trembled, a growl in her throat. 

“Dru?”

“Where’s my demon Spike?” she snapped, and climbed up out of the coffin. Then she was gone, the door slamming behind her.

Spike held himself and wept, Buffy in his eyes, Buffy in his brain, Buffy twisting up his gut, alone, all alone. Dru couldn’t hold him through grief. It was too hot, too human, and she was cold and full of violence, and it wasn’t even fair to expect her to hold him through this.

Then a moment later the door opened again, and Dru dropped something into the coffin with him. It was one of the victims from upstairs, bleeding from a dozen bites, and Dru grabbed Spike’s head and forced it to a new gash on her throat. “Drink, you sorry excuse for a demon. Drown it out! Do it!” 

“Dru,” Spike struggled, but she held his head, and the blood was right there, pouring out so fast it would soon pool in the coffin, and he’d had so much in the last few days, and what did a bit more matter? And he kissed the wound and kissed it gentle, and the victim, already weak, relaxed and cried, as if she was crying for him, and she took his tears away until they dried up in his own eyes. Dru left him then, back to the party upstairs, and Spike held his victim, warm and gentle and human, and she tasted so good, and he suckled gently enough that he didn’t hurt her, and she went under from the anesthetic venom in his saliva, and she kept bleeding into his mouth as he held her until her blood slowed and then stopped and her heartbeat faded and she died in his arms. But he kept holding her, clutching onto her corpse like a teddy bear, desperate for someone human to love him. Even if it was only in death. 


	6. Mad Again

“So what are we thinking? Vampire?” Xander asked the others.

“I don’t know,” Willow said. She moved up to the table at the Magic Box and glanced over the paper. “I mean, some random serial killer might just be using Lake Casitas as his dumping ground. We don’t know that it’s supernatural in origin, right?”

“This close to Sunnydale?” Tara asked. “Vampire seems more likely.” 

“It’s _got_ to be a vampire,” Dawn told them all, staring at the headline. _Fifteen dead in Lake Casitas. _She scanned the article. Fifteen bodies, weighted down with ropes and rocks, had been discovered so far. They’d first been alerted when a sport fisherman had scooped up a foot in his net. They’d dredged that section of the lake looking for its owner, and so far they’d found fifteen bodies, none of them the owner of the missing foot. “It’s a lot of bodies.” 

“Weighed down seems kinda weird for vampires. Don’t they usually just dump the bodies wherever?”

“Not if there’s too many,” Anya said. “The clever ones, the good ones? They know better than to leave a trail.”

“It doesn’t say they found bites on their necks, does it?” Willow asked. 

“Oh, yeah, it does,” Dawn said, skimming down to lower in the article. 

“I didn’t read that,” Xander said, snatching the paper from her. 

Dawn snatched it back. “It says it. Right here. ‘Authorities are finding the victims difficult to identify due to severe predation, likely from fish and other waterlife.’ That says bite marks.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Xander said. “Does it?”

“Yeah, it does, honey,” Anya said. “Predation means bite marks, which means vampires, just like exsanguination, trauma to the throat, and gangs on PCP. It’s straight out of the New York Times editorial standards. So what do we do about it?” 

“Nothing,” said Giles from behind the counter. 

Dawn looked up at him. If he thought she didn’t know he kept a bottle back there, he was wrong. “But we’re the Scooby gang. We fight the vampires, don’t we?” 

“At the moment we’re only keeping the vampire population controlled in Sunnydale, and we’ve a hard enough time managing that,” he said. “If we had Buffy I might send her to look into it, but we’re overstretched here as it is. Lake Casitas is out of our jurisdiction.”

“Since when do we have a jurisdiction?” Dawn asked. 

“Since always,” Giles said brusquely. “Buffy was meant to guard the hellmouth. That’s all we’re expected to do.” 

“One girl in all the world though, wasn’t it?” Dawn insisted. “I mean, it’s… vampires. I could help.”

“You are not helping,” Tara said. 

“Buffy wouldn’t want you hunting vampires, Dawny,” Willow said. “You’re too young.” 

She was getting fed up with all this babying they were doing. She wasn’t the key anymore, or at least no one seemed to care if she was the key anymore, and it wasn’t as if she was some stupid kid. “I’m just as old as you guys were. I’m even older than Buffy was when she started hunting vampires.” 

“Buffy was the Slayer, you are not,” Giles told her pointedly. 

“But I was made from her, wasn’t I?” Dawn said. “I have, you know, instincts or something. I want to help.” 

“We’re not sure we’re doing anything yet,” Tara said gently. 

“And Giles has a point, Dawnster,” Xander said. “We are stretching ourselves just keeping a lockdown on the vampires here.”

“Oh, is that what we’re doing? Lockdown?” Anya said with an eyeroll. “I thought we were mostly just trying to get the sexbot to stop wanting to have sex. It’s not like we’ve patrolled all that much.”

“Not very effectively, anyway,” Xander muttered. 

“But….” It didn’t sound right to Dawn. “We have the Buffy Bot, And we have Spike. Spike could look into it for us, couldn’t he?” 

“We don’t have Spike,” Xander said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

Not since that last disastrous outing with the Buffy Bot. “Only a couple days,” Dawn said loyally. Though truthfully, she didn’t know. She’d snuck out of the house a few days ago while Willow was studying and tried to go to Spike’s crypt. He hadn’t been there. Usually he came by the house every day, or every other day at best. It had been a week since that phone call from her father, and she’d heard practically nothing from Spike in all that time. Just that one, brief visit. “Besides, he’s coming tonight, isn’t he?” 

“I-I don’t know,” Tara said doubtfully. 

“He is running awfully late,” Willow said.

“But this was, like, a planned Scooby meeting. He said he’d come, so he’ll come.” 

“He didn’t come last time,” Xander said. 

“He meant to,” Dawn said. “He just got the day wrong. That’s a mistake, not on purpose or anything. He won’t do it again. He’s not going to run off like Buffy’s other….” She stopped herself from referring to Spike as Buffy’s boyfriend. “Just, he’ll be here.” 

“Yes, well, I think relying on Spike in the first place was a bit of misguided gesture,” Giles said. “If there’s anyone I wouldn’t count on, it would be Spike.” 

The front door of the Magic Box slammed open. “Don’t use my name in vain, Rupert,” Spike said tightly. Giles had the decency to turn his head away, looking a little abashed as Spike strode in. “Meeting already called to order? Sorry I’m late. Had a hell of a time with traffic. Here you go, niblet.” He tossed Dawn a candy bar. He sat down broadly in a chair at the table, his legs spread, every inch of him relaxed and confident. He looked great, actually. Spike usually looked a little thin and pale. Now he was still pale, but he seemed stronger, more sure of himself. “Now what were we talking about?” 

“There’s a vampire, by Lake Casitas,” Anya said. “Or we think there is.”

Spike’s nostrils flared, an expression that everyone missed but Dawn. “Is there, now?” he asked. “Well, we can’t have that.” 

“Well, Giles thinks we can,” Anya continued. “He says we have too much to do here. Isn’t that what you said, Giles?” 

Giles sighed, looking put-upon. “We don’t know what’s there, or where it might be. We only know that some creature -- vampire, demon, or other -- is using the lake as a dump site. They could be vampires from Sunnydale for all we know. Lake Casitas isn’t far away.”

“Twenty minutes if the traffic’s clear,” Xander said. “But it’s usually better just to go to the coast.”

“To dump the bodies?” Spike asked. “River’s a little closer, and has the benefit of carrying it away. Don’t have to worry about the tides bringing it back.” 

“I just meant if you wanted to go fishing or something,” Xander said. “I wasn’t talking about body dumpage.”

“Pity,” Spike said. “And here I thought we were going to have something in common. Could be your mentor.”

“Shut up,” Xander said wearily.

Spike grinned unpleasantly, cocking an eyebrow. “Rupes, want to pour me a finger of that whiskey? One mentor to another.”

“Not particularly,” Giles said, taking another drink. 

“Lake Casitas is a little further away than our patrols, though,” Willow went on doggedly. “Maybe Buffy would have checked it out but… we don’t have….”

“Buffy,” Tara finished for her. 

Dawn waited for Spike to flinch, like he always did when one of them mentioned Buffy’s name, but he just shrugged, nonchalant, and took up the newspaper.

“I’ll check it out for you.” He glanced icily over the paper, looking almost smug. “Yep, sure sounds like a vampire all right. Probably some pissant fledge. I’ll take care of it.” 

“You don’t know where it is!” Giles snapped.

“Can find out,” Spike said. “What, you think I can’t read a bloody map, Rupert? How many potential lairs can a little place like Lake Casitas have, anyway?” 

“You need backup,” Xander said. “We can take my car.” 

“If you can call the beigemobile that,” Spike said. “Thanks, but I have my own wheels. Is there anything else we’re discussing this evening, or can I go?” 

“Don’t you want…” Dawn started, and then stopped. He glanced at her. “I just thought you’d stay for a bit,” she said lamely. It had been days since they’d hung out. It just wasn’t the same without him. 

“Actually, I was hoping you’d do another session with the bot,” Willow said. “I think I got it to stop that circling thing.”

Spike made a face. 

“It’s fine,” Dawn said suddenly. “You don’t have to help.” 

Spike stared at her.

“You don’t have to work with the bot if you don’t want to,” Dawn said. “I mean, if that’s what’s been keeping you away….” 

“Nothing’s been keeping me away,” Spike said. 

“Then you don’t have to stay,” Dawn said. “You must have better things to do than look after a stupid little kid.” 

“Maybe I will one day,” Spike snapped at her, making her flinch. “Meanwhile you should learn to keep your mouth shut when the grown-ups are talking, yeah?” 

Dawn blinked. That was absolutely not what she’d expected. “Are you all right?” she asked. 

“I’m fine,” Spike snapped. “It’s fine. Let’s play Ring-A-Rosies with the bot.” 

“You sure it’s all right?” Tara asked. 

“Since when are you all so curious about how I feel about it?” Spike demanded. “Where is the damned thing? I’ll spar with it, I’ll run races with it, whatever you want me to do.” 

“Not have sex with it,” Xander muttered, which earned a slow glare from Spike. 

“Just let it pursue you for a while,” Willow said, looking relieved. “Make sure I got that glitch out of its system.” Willow opened the door to the training room, where the Buffy Bot was waiting patiently. It came in as Willow opened the door. 

“Hello, Willow. Thank you for letting me in. Oh, Spike! I have a joke for you! Knock-knock.” 

“Oh, still?” Spike asked Willow, while Anya asked. “Who’s there?” 

“Wooden shoe.” 

“Don’t bloody humor it,” Spike warned them. 

“Woodn’t shoe like to hear another knock-knock joke?” Buffy Bot asked. 

Spike glared at Willow. 

“Sorry. That one’s… still causing me troubles.” 

“All right, so that’s them off, then,” Xander said as Spike and Willow went with the bot. “Dawnster? Why don’t you let me and Anya take you home.”

Dawn was disappointed. She wanted to talk to Spike. It had only been a week, but she was really starting to miss him. “Okay,” she said reluctantly, and made her goodbyes, heading off with Xander. But when she got to the car, she spotted Spike’s DeSoto, and an idea struck her. “Xander?” she said. “I think I’m going to wait and walk home with Tara.” 

“Really?” 

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a nice night. And Willow will be back soon. I’m super curious to see how the bot acted.” 

“She wants to see if it messed up again,” Anya asked. 

“Yeah. So I’ll just go back inside,” she said. 

“You sure?” 

“Yeah.” 

“I’ll wait here until you get inside.” 

Dawn almost sighed, but she had a plan for that, too. “Okay. See you.” She ran back inside. 

Tara and Giles looked up from their respective books. “I just forgot something,” Dawn said. She searched her mind for what she could have forgotten. Her backpack, a book, what? Everything seemed impossible. Then she remembered the candy bar in her pocket. “Oops!” She pulled it out. “Here it is. Never mind.” She glanced out the window. Xander’s car had left. Yes! “Okay, bye!” She dashed back out, knowing that Tara and Giles just thought she was a scatterbrained kid. 

She went up to Spike’s DeSoto. She knew for a fact that the trunk didn’t lock properly. Spike said Drusilla had smashed it once when he’d locked her in there. He couldn’t open the trunk with the key anymore, so instead used a screwdriver to pry it open. She thought she could probably get it to open if she used the same trick. It didn’t open the moment she pulled at it, but when she slid a pen from her backpack into the crack, it popped open. She knew the Scoobies would think this was stupid, but she wanted to know where Spike was going these days if he wasn’t at his crypt. His new attitude, the flippant way he’d taken on the job, how much better he seemed, how much nastier he was, it all struck her as weird. Something was happening with him, something he didn’t want them to know about, and she was going to find out. Also, she was sick and tired of being told she was too young for these things. 

Wherever Spike was going, she was going to go with him. 

  
  


***

Spike slipped into his car with a deep sigh. Unfortunately, working with the bot was just as hard now as it had been before Drusilla reemerged. Everything was still just as hard, it was just that the blood and the violence helped to disguise it for a while. 

Dru had said nothing about his breakdown the other morning, small favors. He’d woken a few hours later from a fitful, nightmare-laced sleep, still clutching a corpse gone cold. He’d hauled it out, added it to the pile in the kitchen ready for disposal the next evening, and gone back to Drusilla, expecting her to chastise him for not being demon enough. But she did nothing but offer him more blood, and he’d hesitated only a second before taking it. He was eating a lot, as much as he’d used to when he was a fledge. He wondered if she was thinking of him like a fledgeling, and whether -- or rather when -- she’d turn on him. Because this was Drusilla. She would turn on him sooner or later. 

But so far the only trouble he’d had from his breakdown was that it hadn’t been the only one. The power of blood and passion to disguise his grief had been short-lived. Even though he kept himself full and Drusilla made herself constantly available, waves of grief for Buffy still pounded at the corner of his brain, and sometimes he was still overcome by them. Then he had to beat someone up, or leave the room and cry, because he couldn’t be seen crying in front of those monsters in the pub. It would be asking for death. 

Maybe he _was_ asking for death, he mused. He hadn’t climbed the tower again in the last week, or gazed out the door at the sunshine, but it wasn’t as if Dru and a room full of demons was _safe_. He was still playing with the razor’s edge, still dancing around the idea of suicide. But he’d still made a promise. 

He’d wished Dawn had been there when he got back, but Tara said she’d gone home with Xander, and Spike still wasn’t sure how to broach the subject to her. He had two options -- take Dawn away from the Scoobies, or build up enough of a demon army in Sunnydale that even the Scoobies couldn’t fight them. But he _hated_ making minions, and he couldn’t do it now anyway without Dru’s help, so it was easier to just let her make them. But she wouldn’t make minions for this, and it would take time, and it would be easier to just take the Scoobies out of the equation bring Dawn with him. Which meant talking Dawn into it. 

“All right,” he said, glancing at his rearview mirror, half wishing he had a reflection to talk to. He gunned the DeSoto onto the highway and decided to practice. 

“All right, little bit, I got a proposal for you. We leave all this behind, yeah? Xander and the birds and everyone, and we go off, just you and me.” Well, and Drusilla and a squadron of minions to protect her. No. It was too soft. Also a lie. Not that lying mattered, but she’d get brassed off at him when she found it out. 

“You’re not safe here, niblet. There’s too many nasties in Sunnydale.” Well, that was always true. “You come with me and I’ll keep you absolutely safe, love.” It wouldn’t work. She wasn’t frightened enough. She had Buffy’s courage and a certain cavalier attitude toward her own well-being.

“Get in the damned car, kid. We’re going.”

Well, it had the advantage of brooking no arguments. 

How was he going to manage this? The trouble was, she loved the Scoobies, Xander and the witches and Giles and even the ex-demon. But he’d made a promise, and… and he wanted Dawn with him. The best way to keep her safe would be to put her in a box and never let her out again. Lock her up in a lair and just leave her there with minions on guard. Of course, minions sometimes turned on their masters, so he’d really have to do a power play on them. Maybe get two sets of minions, minions to watch the minions who were watching the lair where Dawn was protected…. 

This was making no sense. He’d have to talk to Drusilla about it sooner rather than later. He’d have to get some kind of security system that was failsafe and foolproof. And he’d have to… he’d have to….

He’d have to get more blood. It would make sense again then.

***

Drusilla could feel him speeding back to her, little tingles in her spine telling her that her baby was coming closer. It had come to her in whispers, flashes, images of false reality that it was all coming to a close tonight. All she needed to do was wait. She heard his DeSoto squeal into the gravel driveway, the engine cut off, the door slam. She arched her back and made certain sure she looked appetizing for her hungry one, smoothing the bodice of her low cut dress. He slammed open the door, and she made herself smile, though he was rank with the smell of humanity, and his heart was tangled. 

Drusilla had begun a new game while he was gone to keep the boys busy. The latest victim was held between two demons while another tried to aim darts at a bullseye painted on his shirt with blood. She sat on the bar like a queen, and carefully reached out to pet the head of one of her minions -- a dull-eyed, thick browed bloodling with no valor in his heart, but she knew it got Spike’s blood up to get a little jealous. Often she would make him jealous only to draw him closer, to heat his blood and make him want her more. Unfortunately all that had happened after the slayer got her spark in him was to make him burn for something else more fiercely, and all the demons and bedmates she’d taken hadn’t flooded her fire out of his blood. 

Well, this time it helped, if only a little. Spike growled at the beastie, and her minion scampered, ducking tightly under her arm to get out of Spike’s sight. He was too slow. Spike grabbed him by the neck and threw him across the room, to a roar of approval from the other demons. He only broke a table, and climbed nervously to his feet, eying Spike with terror in his yellow eyes. As well he should. He wouldn’t have been the first minion Spike had dusted for getting too close to Dru.

“Spike!” Drusilla said, smiling at his return. “Did you run your little errands?”

“I did. And we’ve been found out. To many demons, too many bodies in one place.” He came up to Dru and caressed her cheek. “You were right, pet. It’s time to head out.” 

Drusilla purred and leaned into his caress. “Of course I’m right, love. I’m always right. Do you want to leave tonight?” 

“Tomorrow,” Spike said. “Or the next day. I have… I have one more thing to do.” 

He had to claim his little sparrow. Well, the whispers in her head told her that would happen, had happened, was happening as it was. “Always one more thing,” she pouted. She pulled herself off the bar and into Spike’s arms, where she hoped he’d spin her romantically, but instead he set her down. She kept a tight rein on her fury, forcing her hand down as it lifted to slap him. She kissed him instead, making it deep, and Spike let her for a moment before pulling away. “Don’t overthink it, Spike. You know what it is we need.”

“We need… to talk, Dru,” Spike said. “I need to explain something to you. There was a promise I made.”

“Promises, promises, I don’t want to hear your promises,” Drusilla said. “You promise me anything, and you won’t want to pay.” 

Spike sighed. “Dru, I have a problem.” 

“You won’t have it long, my pet,” Drusilla said. 

“No, I do.”

“Don’t bother me with trifles. Whatever it is, we’ll play with it tomorrow.” 

“It’s not a game, Dru.” 

“It’s all games, always games. Look at my new game, Spike,” Drusilla said. She turned him to look at the victim, whimpering with pain as the darts embedded themselves in his flesh. 

“She won’t like that,” Spike said quietly. 

Dru dug her nails into the back of his neck. “She?”

Spike gasped. “No,” he said. He turned back to her. “We really need to talk.” 

“No,” she said. She could hear the blood beating, hear the possibilities slipping. She glanced up at the window, then away, afraid Spike might follow her eyes. She could see without them, anyway. “Raise the music,” she bellowed.

“Dru, we can’t talk with--”

“You need more blood, darling,” she said. The kettle was boiling over. She needed to stop him now. “Bring him over!” 

“Dru...”

“Drink, puppy,” she said, quickly, desperately. “Drink deep, my bad dog. Don’t think it. No thoughts, no schemes, no confusions. Take the life, bleed the blood, drink deep, shh, shh!”

“Dru.” He rubbed at his face. 

She cupped her hand against the blood on the victim’s chest and then gently moved Spike’s hand from his face, and pressed her own into it. Blood, blood was always the answer. And she could barely hear it under the music, but it was there, peering at the window, the future. The lid had popped, the pressure had broken. She smeared the blood along his lips until his eyes brightened and his fangs grew. Then he licked her fingers, sensuously sucking the blood off. She danced with him, spinning him in joy, laughing, and kissed him deeply. Then she reached back and broke the victim’s neck. Spike sometimes had difficulty with the live ones, as he could only take what bled from them naturally, he couldn’t suck, because sucking would hurt them, and she needed him to suck. She needed him to act.

“Drink,” she whispered. “Drink, drink, drink, drink, drink,” growing louder with each repetition. The minions heard her, echoed her, until there was a cacophony of demon howls echoing through the bar. “Drink, drink, drink!” Spike hesitated, then laughed, and if it was hysterical more than evil, Dru could make that work. “Drink!” she crowed at him, pressed the fresh corpse into his grasp. He looked at her, yellow eyes hollow and desperate, still chuckling, and she saw the moment when he chose between throwing the corpse away and launching himself at her in fury, and succumbing to the need and the hysteria and gorging on the blood. In one vision he fought her, and she prepared for that, but in the other vision he fell, and he fell, and in reality he fell, and he lowered the victim to the table and fed from him fiercely, ravaging at his neck to get more of the freshly dead blood to flow. 

That was it. That was the moment she’d seen. The turning point. Dru knew she was safe, he was distracted, he was lost, and her favorite version of the future, the path she’d seen that could walk him back to her, it had landed, and was starting to close behind him. Soon there’d be no backtracking. No escaping. One more act and she’d have him forever, at her beck and call, unable to choose anything but her darkness for the rest of his existence. 

She backed slowly away toward the door, catching the eye of two of her demon minions as she retreated. 

Someone was waiting for her outside. 

*** 

The trunk of Spike’s car was not empty. Dirty laundry, empty booze bottles, piles of battered paperback books, empty oil canisters, greasy rags, crusty plastic bags that had probably once held blood. And stains. She’s seen those when she first climbed in, stains on the old, dusty upholstery. Old, brown stains that Dawn was having a hard time forgetting about just now.

She had shoved them all the debris aside and around her, but it had made the drive very cramped and frightening. Unable to see anything, since she didn’t have a flashlight, she tried to find the spot where she had to insert the pen, and couldn’t find it, and then she dropped the pen, then she couldn’t find it either in the rubble in the car, and she kind of freaked out. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to get out, and considered kicking at the walls of the trunk to alert Spike to her presence while they still drove. But no. No. She made herself breathe, made herself calm down. If Dru kicked her way out, Dawn could too, couldn’t she? So she’d wait. In the dark. In the oily-smelling trunk. Feeling more and more carsick. 

God, how was she supposed to manage this?

Finally the car stopped with a lurch, throwing Dawn against the back of the trunk, into some empty bottles that Spike had stashed back there, and one bruised her hip, but she held out for a minute until she was sure Spike had left the car, the door slamming echoing through the whole vehicle Then she shifted in the darkness until she faced the trunk bonnet directly and then kicked at it, over and over until it popped and she was free. She silently thanked the broken trunk lock, and Spike for telling her about it, and climbed stiffly out of the trunk. She hadn’t expected to get so stiff curled up in there. She hadn’t been there that long, had she? But it had felt like an eternity, anyway. 

She was in the country. No buildings were around except an adobe-looking bar, with neon on the windows and a bunch of motorcycles lined up outside. Dawn was disappointed and a little irritated with herself. Spike was skipping out on her just to go to some dumb bar and get drunk? Well, of course he was. She was tempted to just go right in there and tell him to get to grips with himself and just come home. 

And then the decoration on one of the bikes caught her eye. It was a skull dangling over the handlebars, or whatever they called that on a motorcycle. At first it looked like a Halloween decoration or something, and no one ever said that bikers were above using skull imagery in their decorating, but she took a step towards it… and it didn’t look fake. Or old. It still had stains and clumps of flesh clinging to it, and the teeth were definitely real. A couple even had silver fillings. 

Dawn gulped. Maybe… maybe Spike was hunting demons? 

A loud sound came from the bar itself, and Dawn ducked. Then she bit her lip. What was she doing? If she was going to find out what Spike was doing, she should do that, right? She walked up the steps and paused. No… she’d look in the window, first. Any place that had bikers with actual human skulls on their handlebars probably wouldn’t let her in, and if Spike was killing demons, he wouldn’t approve of her getting between him and his fun. 

She crept up to the window and crouched down, trying to get a glimpse of Spike. She couldn’t see him at first, the place filled with black leather and movement and shouting, but then, there. There was his long coat and the distinctive blond head. He was facing the bar, talking to someone who was sitting on it, but she couldn’t get a good look at them around Spike. The one thing that was clear was that the creatures around Spike were all demons. Every one of them, some of them vampires in game face, some of them just looking scary and weird. 

Then he helped whoever it was hop down from off the bar, but she still couldn’t see her very closely. It was definitely a girl, though. She was wearing a dress. And then Spike… kissed her. 

Dawn still couldn’t see the woman’s face, but Spike was definitely kissing her, all right. Dawn’s fingers gripped the edge of the windowsill. Well, there was nothing that said that Spike had to be celibate, right? If he picked up with some demon woman, someone harmless and pretty and empty, like Anya or even Harmony, that… that was all right, right? It wasn’t as if he was cheating on Buffy. Buffy was dead, anyway, wasn’t she? Dawn couldn’t stop tears from itching at her eyes regardless as she considered whether that was really cheating on Buffy’s memory or not, and then the tears pricked away as the woman turned Spike, and herself, and Dawn finally got a look at her. 

Maybe she’d never met her in person. Maybe she didn’t really know anything about her. But Dawn had memories, implanted or not, and she remembered seeing Drusilla amid the mob of women that had attacked Xander at her house one day. She remembered pictures of Drusilla that Buffy had shown her, warning her to be wary if she ever saw this woman. And she knew descriptions of the woman, long, loving descriptions muttered by a drunken Spike as he came to drown his sorrows in hot chocolate and sympathy in her own kitchen. And with her long hair and her big eyes and her sleek figure, this deadly beauty had to be, it simply had to be Drusilla. 

Dawn’s mouth went dry as she considered the implications of this. Spike was here among demons. He was here with Drusilla. And he wasn’t trying to kill her. 

And then it got worse. A man was brought up into Dawn’s field of view, a man covered in blood, dangling between two demons. And Dru dipped her fingers in the man’s blood and let Spike lick it off, sensuously sucking the blood off her fingers, his game face on, fangs flashing in his mouth. A low sound started amidst the music leaking through the windows, a chant, _drink, drink, drink,_ then louder, _drink, drink, drink,_ and Spike laughed, Dawn saw him laugh, he was laughing at the idea, and then he plunged himself at the man, tearing at his throat, and Dawn’s mouth fell open, and she cried out and backed away, and then her foot found air instead of concrete and she was toppling down the stairs and off the platform and then down into the gravel driveway where she ran into one of the bikes, which fell over, and knocked into another, then another. 

Dawn had the wind knocked out of her, and she was bruised all over, but she scrabbled for her feet anyway, desperate, wondering if there was a payphone anywhere, or a farmhouse nearby where she could make a phone call, because she had to call the Scoobies, she had to call Giles or Willow, she had to let them know that something was wrong, something was dreadfully wrong, and there were demons in Lake Casitas, and Spike was with them, and Drusilla was there, and Spike was with them, Spike was with them, something terrible had happened, Spike was with the demons, Spike….

And it didn’t matter. Because the moment she got to her feet she found Drusilla staring at her with wide blue eyes, and a demon flanking her on either side, and Dawn knew without a doubt that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Spike was already lost, and so, it seemed, was she. 


	7. Lost Again

_Spike was following a corridor, with a blood trail like breadcrumbs, leading him down a one way path. It looked like the initiative corridor, but it could have been anywhere. “You know where this is going,” Buffy whispered behind his back. Since when did she let him take point? “You know exactly where this is going.”_

_“You have to shut up, or I won’t find it.” _

_“You’ll never shut me up.” _

_Spike whirled on her. “Why not? Why can’t I just shut you out, leave you behind? Wouldn’t that solve the problem, too?” _

_She shook her head. “That’s not love.” _

_Spike threw up his hands, then shrugged, and reached out to slug her. The blow connected, but wasn’t satisfying. She hit him back and he sailed and hit the wall. Then she was straddling him, glaring down over him with the stake in her hand, holding it to his heart. And then she did stake him, but he didn’t dust. The stake went in, and in, and the ache in his breast just got deeper, until he groaned, and the stake disappeared, and he grabbed Buffy with both hands and pulled her close against him. “Why did you do this to me?”_

_“You did it to yourself,” Buffy whispered in his ear. “Now if only you can be true to yourself.” _

_Spike tried to kiss her, but she was elusive as smoke, and fell out of his hands. “Are you really going to follow this trail?” She indicated where the trail was leading. There was screaming down the corridor, and darkness, and he could feel the chill even though as a vampire it wouldn’t affect him. _

_“Don’t I have to? If I go this way, I know where I’m going. Back the way I came, I know where I’ve been.” He shook his head. “How long can I be that?”_

_“Do you think you don’t have any choices?” _

_“I think all the choices lead to pain.” _

_She reached out to touch his face. “Isn’t that what living is?” _

He struggled up to follow her, but the act of struggling made him wake up, and he was lying with his head on a table next to a spent corpse, a little woozy. The last thing he remembered was Drusilla and the others telling him to drink. He blinked the blood and booze out of his eyes. This man had been extremely drunk before they’d started their game with him. Spike wiped the blood from his chin and stood up to find Drusilla. 

Drusilla wasn’t there. He headed down to the private rooms, including the storage room with the double coffin, and Dru wasn’t there. He went back upstairs and asked among the demons. Dru wasn’t there. Not only wasn’t Drusilla there, but half the minions were gone. He asked the remaining two, which he knew Dru hadn’t made because he’d seen them around Sunnydale before, but they didn’t know what had happened to her. “Maybe she’s out hunting,” one said. 

Which didn’t exactly make sense, because first of all, she’d been using her minions to hunt for the most part, and secondly, they were clearing out and there had been a victim on hand. Spike went outside, to see if she was just enjoying the moon. 

The trunk of his DeSoto stood open. That brought him up short. Not that he kept anything valuable in there, since he knew the lock was wonky. He went to it to see if it had been raided or anything. Nope, the thing still seemed full of junk, but it was kind of pushed to the edges, and now that he looked….

He froze, corpselike, as he caught sight of Dawn’s school backpack. He reached down to pick it up, hoping she’d left a message for him in it or something. No, no notes, but the fact that it was here was a message in itself. “Oh, bit,” he said through clenched teeth. He slammed the backpack back into the trunk and whirled for the pub. “Drusilla!” he shouted loudly as he barrelled in. “If any of you know where Dru is, tell me fast,” he announced to the assembled demons. 

“She left just after you started dinner,” the schloff at the bar said. 

Spike’s head sank. “You got a phone?” he asked the schloff. “Give me the phone.” 

The schloff handed the phone up from behind the bar, and Spike dialed hurriedly. No answer at Buffy’s. He tried the Magic Box. Picked up after the first ring. “It’s Spike,” Spike said. 

“Oh, Spike,” Anya said. “Dawn’s gone. Did they find you at your place?” 

“No. What’s up with Dawn?” 

“She didn’t go home tonight. Xander and I thought she left with Tara, Tara thought she’d left with us, when they got home they found she hadn’t been there all night. The others are out looking for her now. Willow has a new locator spell, but it’s not showing her in Sunnydale, so I don’t think it works very well, and--”

“I’m on it,” Spike told her. “Tell them I’m on the case when they come back.” 

“Do you know where she is?” 

“No,” Spike said. “But I’m gonna find out.” He clicked the phone down and headed back outside, sniffing the air, feeling the currents of reality. Dawn’s scent wasn’t as burned into his brain as Buffy’s, but his senses were heightened thanks to all the human blood, and he was top of his game. Except for his judgement. He’d abandoned that days ago. He had to find it now. He had to find it, or he’d never manage to find Dawn. 

***

Drusilla held close to her new little lamb, carefully brushing Dawn’s hair. Her minions waited, bored but obedient, perching on chairs and against the walls, waiting. Waiting for the inevitable. The girl shuddered and whimpered, cringing against Dru’s touch, gentle though it had been so far. The abandoned library was quiet, all the books sleeping in their jackets, waiting for the funding to come back to Lake Casitas and turn the library back into a living thing. But now it was dead and quiet, the word blood sleeping on its shelf-veins, and it was the perfect place to turn a school-girl into a proper dolly, princess of the night. The little thing was tied up, her hands held together with ropes. “Got to have you looking presentable when Daddy comes home,” Dru said. 

“Please. If you’ll let me go, my friends won’t hurt you,” Dawn whispered. “Spike won’t hurt you.”

“Spike won’t hurt me either way,” Drusilla said. “I can see him dancing, dancing, singing in the darkness. Too many paths all lead to his destruction. I can see the burning baby fish around his head, sparks around his head.” She used to think they were his thoughts, burning and burning around him, but now she knew they were sparks from the fire that was going to burn him up. 

She saw so many paths. Paths where he was tortured, tortured by a creature that made even Drusilla shiver, even as she was fascinated by its strength and power. A turok-han, a vampire's vampire, dancing around a faceless power with her own face. That was off the path. As was the slayer, twisting Spike into her arms, drawing him into the sunlight with her wiles. That was off the path. 

No, back, onto the path. There was her Spike, with her, together with her, an evil force to be reckoned with, back to his bed, back to his arms, back to the blood. That she could see on the path. She saw other things too, on the path. She saw him screaming as the chip in his head fired and fired, and human blood unable to stop the pain. She saw him mindless and gibbering as the pain drove him mad. She saw him her own little child, with only moments through the madness. But she saw him as _hers_, and while she had moments where she enjoyed the visions off the path, of Spike soulful and glorious, the demon in her cringed when she saw Spike wasn’t hers anymore. She wanted him as hers. It made her weep to think she’d lost him for good. 

“He’ll be here soon,” Drusilla said, cradling the trussed up Dawn. “Any moment he’ll wake up to realize you’re here, you’re gone, you’re lost, you’re found. Any moment he’ll come crashing through the door, the black knight, my Lancelot, my darling boy.”

“Spike isn’t yours,” Dawn said, cringing at Drusilla’s touch. 

“Oh, he was always mine. Did you think him yours?” She lifted Dawn and set her on her lap, continuing to brush her hair. “Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?” she whispered. “Give thee life and bid thee feed by the stream and o’er the mead.”

“You’re creeping me out,” Dawn whispered. 

“Little lamb, I’ll tell thee,” Dru whispered back into her ear. “Little lamb, I’ll tell thee.” And then the fangs came out, and she kissed the pain into the lamb’s throat, and it bleated and struggled, but she had a good grip on the girl, and then the path closed again, and she let go of the morsel and sighed, because the only way the path stayed open was if the girl stayed alive. If Spike found her dead, all he’d do was dust. She had only one narrow path to keep Spike, and keep him with her, on the side of evil, on the side of the demons, and it required this little lamb safe and… well, not unharmed. But breathing. Drusilla licked the blood off her neck and the lamb whimpered. 

“Can’t do to have you bleat too loudly, little lamb.” Dru pulled a ribbon from her pocket and tied it around the girl’s mouth, pulling it tight, so her jaws were forced open and her tongue back. The girl struggled and shifted, but Dru held her with her eyes, and she stilled. “One, two, three o-lary,” Dru whispered. The sound of a car snicked up the driveway, and Dru smiled. “He’s found us. Secrets don’t keep, they’ll always sneak out. Are you ready for your roll, my dolly? Daddy’s home.” 

And the door opened. 

  
  


***

Spike had made several false stops, driving his DeSoto to where he thought the scent currents were leading him only to find dead ends, over and over, but finally he pulled up outside a pokey looking office building that had paper over the windows and a forced lock. It didn’t look like a library from the outside, despite the tarnished sign over the door. But then, most small-town libraries were tiny and unimpressive. Drusilla liked libraries, museums, and churches. Places where old treasures and legends were kept locked and catalogued. It wasn’t surprising that she’d choose here. 

He had no plan, no strategy, no tactics. He burst in the door with his fist around a stake. When he found the place crawling with Dru’s minions, he growled low. “Dru, you’d better not have eaten the girl, or I’ll kill you so slow the dust will trickle like an hourglass.” 

Drusilla stood slowly, leaving Dawn on the floor. “Of course I haven’t killed her, pet. Though she does taste divine. I was waiting for you.” 

“Waiting?” 

“My own true dark knight. I wouldn’t have done it without you.” 

“Done what?” Spike strode forward, and Drusilla let him go to Dawn. She was bound, with a tight ribbon for a gag, and the wound on her neck was raw, but she didn’t seem to have caught the vein, or if she had it had clotted well enough. She was in no danger of bleeding out yet. Her heartbeat was a little fast, but probably not dangerously. “Come on, little bit. Let’s get you out of here.” He started to wrestle with the knots on her wrists. 

“I saved her for you, Spike. So you can make her your child.”

Spike looked up. “What?” 

“Sire her. It’s what you want, isn’t it?” 

Spike realized the danger wasn’t past. His hand reclosed on the stake and he faced her. “Dru. I’m going to untie the girl, and we’re going to walk out of here. That’s what’s going to happen.” 

Dru made a slight hissing sound, and the minions scattered through the room quickly formed rank around her.

Spike looked around at them. “Oh, so that’s how it is, is it, boys?” he asked. “You standing against me, now? She got you so hungry for dust?” 

“You aren’t a leader,” one of the vampires said. “You don’t hunt, you don’t kill. Who could respect you with that?” 

Spike scoffed. “Oh. One of you want to come and try me?” 

The boys looked nervous, but they stood by Dru.

“You bowed to me, you worked for _me_,” Spike snapped. “Do you think she’s strong enough for you?” 

“Well… yeah,” said one of them. 

“Then why’s she hiding behind you?” Spike asked. 

“Why’s the girl hiding behind you?” one of the boys said. “You’re supposed to be the big bad.” 

“I am the big bad!” Spike snarled, and he turned, kicked the minion who had spoken in the knee, caught him with his free hand and then staked him in one fluid movement. Another minion attacked Spike from behind, and Spike threw him into the wall. He slammed a third into a bookshelf, which collapsed, and Spike turned to stake him, too. When dust exploded around his hand he turned to face Drusilla and the other two minions. 

“Stop fighting, boys,” Drusilla said evenly. The three remaining minions picked themselves up and slunk back to stand by Dru’s side. “Spike, there’s no battle here. I’ve already softened the girl for you, you don’t even need to feed from her. Just a hint of your blood. It’ll flow through the ribbon, you don’t even have to force her mouth, and we’ll have a pretty little daughter all our own.” 

“I’m not turning her, Dru.” 

“Why not?” Drusilla asked. “It’s not as if you can keep her. She’s weak and perishable like this. A rotting dolly. Don’t you want her strong and perfect forever? Don’t you want her… safe?” 

Spike didn’t have a quick answer, but Dawn wasn’t deaf. She screamed through her gag and struggled behind him, and Drusilla darted forward to catch her up. Spike shifted to block her path. 

“Don’t you hear her? Desperate, squealing little pig. Poor lost lamb, ready for the slaughter. Just save her, Spike. Save her, like you used to save me. Save her and make us a family.” 

“You don’t have me chained up and poisoned this time, Dru,” Spike said. “There are things I want from you, that you can seduce me into. This isn’t one of them.”

“Why not?” Drusilla asked. “When you love her and you want her, isn’t this the ultimate sign of that love? My Angelus, he showed me that love. Now it’s time for you to pass the legacy on.”

“It’s not, and I won’t,” Spike said. 

“I won’t stay with you,” she warned. “If you don’t do this for me, if you don’t move on for us, the demon is too weak in you. I can’t be with you if you’re still tied to _her_.”

“Dawn is just--”

“Not her. _Her!_ The slayer!” 

Spike stared into Drusilla’s blue eyes, eyes he’d gazed into for a century, eyes he’d loved, eyes he had cherished, and he knew they’d never be enough for him again. “I’ll always be tied to her, Dru.” 

Drusilla hit him, her claws scratching at his cheek. Spike hissed and shoved her backwards, and the minions caught her. 

“But she’s gone!” Drusilla cried. “This is your chance, she’s gone and you’re free! Take the child, make the child, make a new vampire, feed the blood within you. That’s the only way to kill it!”

“Don’t you get it, love?” Spike said. “I can’t kill it. If I could have killed my love for her, I’d have done it before.” 

Drusilla shook her head. “How will you do it? How will you survive this human grief she’s poisoned you with?” 

“I’ll just have to do it,” Spike said. “That’s the only way to get through it, then, isn’t it? Just live with it. Live through it. Just live.” 

“You’re not alive, Spike. You’re dead. The dead cannot heal.” 

“Then that’s the answer. I won’t bloody heal.”

Drusilla stamped her foot. “Fine then! I’ll do it myself! Hold him, boys.” 

The fight was short, but still too long. Spike fought the last minions, kicking and shoving and staking like a whirlwind, but Drusilla managed to get past him and pick up Dawn. Spike couldn’t get there fast enough, not with the minion he had wrapped around his neck. He didn’t even have time to shout no before Drusilla vamped up and held her head ready to sink her teeth in. But then Dawn kicked her in the crotch. Even on a woman, that hurts, and Dru lost her grip. Dawn landed in a pile of books, and bought Spike the time to dust the last minion before he turned on Dru. 

“Just you and me now, pet.” 

Drusilla growled. “You’d kill me?”

“You already know I would,” Spike snapped. He reached for her, but she ducked and darted behind him. Spike tried to kick her, but she dodged that too. She was older than him, and no longer sickly, and while she wasn’t a fighter like he was, she was no weakling. Spike managed to get a hand on her arm and yanked her forward, the stake at the ready. She twisted and flailed, and her sharp-taloned fingers ran across Spike’s belly. He hissed and pulled away, but she went with him, digging in deeper, piercing through shirt and muscle until her hand was embedded in his torso, and Spike screamed. He lifted his foot and stomped hard on Drusilla’s shoulder, sending her onto the ground. He lifted again to crush her into the floor, but she rolled and leapt to her feet, standing in a guarded crouch, both hands ready for an attack, her right caked in Spike’s blood.

Wounded, but not defeated, Spike backed off, standing between her and Dawn. “I won’t let you do it, pet,” Spike grunted, blood pouring down into his shoes. “You’ll have to dust me first.” 

“Oh, you’ll get there,” Drusilla said, “but I won’t wait around to see it. You had one chance, love, one! I gave it back to you, and now you’re more lost than ever. Bolt and blood and brow and row, and oh, you sinister wreak. She holds you here.” Dru clenched her fist to indicate the hold she saw him in. “She gripped you and grabbed you, and I would have set you free!”

Spike sighed. “You know, the last time you set me free, you made me your slave, love,” he said. “Slave to the love, slave to the blood. Maybe being free does me no good.” He shook his head. “I can’t be free with this thing in my head.” 

“You mean the chip or the slayer?” Drusilla asked. 

Spike grunted. “Both,” he confessed. 

Dru shook her head. “You love pain so much, my boy. You’ve chosen it, now. No way back onto the path for you. Lost in the alleys, lost in the desert, lost, lost, lost in the fire.” She kissed her bloodied hand and blew a kiss from her bloodstained lips. “Learn to cut it out of you. But I don’t think there’s a way back through the weeds.” 

She backed away, skittered outside, and Spike followed her only to hear his car starting up outside. “What? What are you--”

Too late. He poked his head out to see Drusilla driving off in his DeSoto -- _his DeSoto!--_ vanishing into the growing sunrise. For ten precious seconds he watched it go, mourning the loss of it, of her, of the old self he’d been able to get a glimpse of these last six days. But it was the dawn of day seventy-nine after Buffy had died… and there was no turning the clock back. No matter how many times he saved her in his mind, he’d failed when it counted. No matter how many times he tried to turn back to his own past, it was already gone. There was no being a man, but no more being a monster. Not anymore. 

Dru was gone, his old world was gone, and that left him with his spoils in the form of a very frightened and very disillusioned little girl. He went back inside where Dawn waited in the corner, gagged, bound, wide-eyed with fright. He took a step toward her, and she flinched. “It’s only me. Let me just cut you free, here,” he said quietly. He knelt down behind her and cut through the ropes, freeing her from the bonds. 

“That’s better, isn’t it?” he asked. Dawn recoiled from him, and he sighed. “I’d wait fifteen minutes or so before you run out,” he said. “I think she’s gone, but she could come back, and the sun’s not bright enough. Fifteen, twenty minutes and you can go find a phone, call the Scoobies. They’ll come get you.” He swallowed. “I’m not holding you.” 

Dawn wrestled her arms free and pulled the rest of the ropes from her wrists. She pulled the gag from her mouth. “Thank you,” she said, her voice sounding a little thick. Then she turned to Spike, and her voice came out in a hysterical bleat. “What the hell were you doing?!” And then she burst into tears. “I hate you, I hate you,” she said, then she came up and hugged him, making him grunt from the pain in his belly, and then she pulled away and yelled, “I hate you!” again, then she sank down onto her heels and rubbed at her eyes. 

“I….” Spike didn’t know what to say. “Dru won’t hurt you again,” he said, feeling sick as he said it. _Guilt._ He wasn’t supposed to feel guilt, that was supposed to be a soul thing, right? But he felt it anyway, annoying as it was. He couldn’t say he was sorry. 

“Tell me I didn’t see what I thought I saw,” Dawn whispered. She glared up at Spike. “I was there, I was at the bar. Watching. Tell me I didn’t see you kill a guy, and dancing with Drusilla, and being all demony. Tell me.”

“Well, I, uh.” Spike tried to come up with a lie that was better than the truth, but he was so tired, and Dawn smelled so much like food, and Dru had really clocked him a good one there in the stomach and he was a little concerned with his intestines. “Well, misinterpretation, some misrepresentation….” Finally he sighed. “I didn’t kill the bloke. I couldn’t, the chip. He was already dead.” 

“And you just sat there and watched him die, then ate him?” 

Spike moved back a little bit from Dawn, clutching at his stomach. “I’m a demon, Dawn, love. What did you expect?” 

Dawn sat back regarding him for a long time. “I expected the guy who saved me,” Dawn said. “I expected the guy who fights monsters. I expected the guy who loves Buffy.” 

“What Buffy?” Spike asked. He stared at the ceiling to try and keep the damn tears at bay. “The one who hated me, or the one who abandoned us?” 

“The one who died for us,” Dawn said. “I thought you loved her.”

“Always will,” Spike whispered. 

“Then why did you turn on her?” Dawn asked. 

“I didn’t, I just… wanted something… anything that would…. It felt good not to feel bad all the time.” He shook his head. “If someone came up and told you she could make you feel better… wouldn’t you have?” 

“But I’m not a hero,” Dawn said. 

Spike laughed hollowly. “Neither am I.” 

They sat there in silence for a minute. 

“Did it work?” Dawn asked. “Is that what’ll make you feel better? Being bad again?” 

“I hoped it would,” Spike said. “It was different, anyway.” He sighed. “Sort of knew I was whistling in the dark, though. Can’t make the pain disappear by covering it up.”

“So… you still love Buffy?” 

“So help me,” Spike muttered. 

“Do you love Drusilla?” 

“No,” said Spike. “Yes. No.”

“I don’t get it.” 

“Neither do I. I loved your sister, pet. I still love her. And that love is…” He didn’t even have words for what it was. 

“But you went to Drusilla.” 

“Look, niblet. I loved Dru for years. Those years haven’t gone away.”

“But if you have a choice, between them--” 

“There is no choice between them!” Spike snapped. “Buffy’s dead, that’s all I’ve got there. Just death.”

“There is a choice. You can be the man Buffy wanted of you, or the man Dru wanted.” 

“Well, I made it, didn’t I?” Spike shrugged his shoulders. “Chose you.”

“No, you didn’t,” Dawn snapped. “You chose her. Drusilla.” 

Spike looked helpless. “Only for a minute,” he finally said. He looked down. “Dawn, I’m a bad man. I’m not used to the white hat, I’m not used to not crossing the line. I don’t know what to do. I just go with it, and hope.” Tears stabbed his eyes. “But a man like me’s not allowed hope, is he?” He shook his head. “I just wanted to protect you.”

“How? By letting Drusilla eat me?” 

“No! By being the big bad again. I don’t know if you remember, but I used to be something. People were frightened of me, I had a place, a real place. This chip hobbles me, but what strength I’ve got, I can use. If I could get others on board, minions to serve me, followers to guard you, I thought… I thought….”

“But you have others,” Dawn said. “Willow and Xander and Tara, they help protect me.” 

“They’re not mine, are they? I thought I could do something, be something again. Instead I got nothing. Just this body… this heart.”

Dawn sat and thought about this for a minute. “Were you really trying to get minions to protect me?” she asked. 

“Dawn, I’m going to tell you a secret,” Spike said. “I don’t lie well. I’ll do it, but I’m bollocks at it.” 

A half smirk snuck onto Dawn’s face. “I’ve noticed.”

“Can you forgive me?” Spike asked. 

“I ran away again,” Dawn said. “I stowed away in your car.” 

“I noticed,” Spike said.

“Well, if you’ll forgive me….” She rubbed her face. “Just promise me that was the only guy you killed. Well, let die.” 

Spike weighed the answers, and picked one. “Absolutely. Just the one.” 

Dawn looked up at him from under her lashes. “You really _don’t_ lie well.” She came up and put her arms around Spike. “Don’t do it again. I know you miss the monster, but… I’d miss you.”

He gripped tight hold of her, even though she smelled delectable, and what he really wanted was to thrust her from him and warn her away. But she trusted him, still. Even after all this. “I’d miss you too, niblet,” Spike said. He smoothed her hair and just let himself breathe in her damned scent. So like Buffy. “To the end of the world,” he whispered. 


	8. Found Again

They waited a couple of hours for the sun to rise fully before Spike let Dawn venture out and try to find a phone. Spike felt sick. Dru had really caused some damage that was going to take a couple days to heal, and he had to hunker down behind the bookshelves away from the sun. He didn’t like the idea of Dawn wandering Lake Casitas, even in daylight, but she wanted to call Xander, and he didn’t want to keep her prisoner. That thought had fled. He wished he could pace while she was gone, but he couldn’t without threatening that wound, so all he could do was lean back against the bookshelves and try to think. 

And he thought about Buffy. 

“I saved you,” he whispered into the book scented gloom. “I saved you. You fed me to Glory while you saved the little bit. The bitch twisted my head off, but I was a better distraction than the bot. You got there in time, and you and Dawn came down… and I don’t know.” His mind was racing, and he had a hard time concentrating on his meditation. He had to heal. The human blood in his system would help, but this was a deep wound, and the human blood itself was about to become a problem. He had a couple of days before the withdrawal would come, and then he’d have to face days and days of clenching, roaring hunger as he wanted more. Animal blood would stave the hunger, but not the longing, and only time would cure that. Like it would make the grief older. Not softer. He couldn’t imagine it being softer. But older, and something he was more used to. Now that he couldn’t cover it up with blood and sex and violence, he was back to square one. Grief and pain and loneliness. He’d just have to push through his unlife with all of those on his shoulders.

“You saved me,” he whispered suddenly. “I should have dusted when this chip was shoved in my head, when the Initiative tagged me, when Glory caught me. You saved me. Why couldn’t I save you?” 

He closed his eyes and waited for Dawn. And waited. And waited. _She’s run away. She’s abandoned you. She’s been caught by demons. She’s dead. You lost her._

_“You worry too much,” Buffy said. _

_“You made me worry for her. Tied me down with promises and blood.” _

_She was pale in the dim shadows of the library. “And you kept your promise. I’m proud of you, Spike.” _

_Spike looked down. “I hesitated.” _

_“You fought back.” _

_“I went back,” Spike said. “I went back into the dark.” _

_“I always knew you would,” Buffy said. “That chip is just a leash, you still have fangs. I always knew how dangerous you could be.” She stepped closer. “And I trusted you with her anyway.” _

_“I broke.”_

_“Not about her. Not when it came to her.” _

_“I should have saved you.” _

_“I’m fine,” she said. “Think about Dawn, and the others. Take care of them for me.” _

_“I miss you.” That was all that was really in his head. “I miss you.” _

“I got through,” Dawn said bustling in, and Spike gasped, startled. “It took me forever to find a store that wasn’t closed. I got hold of a phone, told Xander to bring a blanket to hide you under, or maybe he could put you in his trunk.”

“You see any demons?” Spike said, waking up fully.

“I went the other direction from that bar. I’m not an idiot. Stayed in full sunlight the whole way, even in the store. It had windows.” 

“What did you tell them?” 

“Just that you saved me and you’re hurt. How’s the stomach?” 

It was bad. “I’ll be all right.” 

“I wanted to buy a first aid kit, but all my money was in my backpack. They didn’t even want to let me use their phone, but I think the neck wound got me somewhere. I got some paper towels from the bathroom for you, make a bandagey thing. Can I look?” 

“It’s ugly, bit.” 

“I can help.” Dawn knelt down by his side and pulled aside his coat to look at the wound. She looked resolved, but only for a second. “Ew!” she said, turning her face away. “Okay. Maybe I can’t.”

“It’ll be fine in a day or two,” Spike said. “It’s already healing. Here, I’ll take those.” He took the pad of paper towels from her and pressed it up against the wound, but it did nothing but cover it. At least she could feel she was doing something, which he knew she needed. 

It wasn’t long before Xander’s car came pulling up to the library door. “Are you sure this is where she said?” Spike heard Xander saying as he approached the door. “It looks so meh.” 

“Well, the lock looks forced,” said Willow. She opened the papered door. “Dawnie? Dawnie, are you in here?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, we’re here,” Dawn called out. “Did you bring a blanket for Spike? We have to get him out of here and somewhere safe. He’s injured. Here, come on.” Dawn helped him stand, and he turned to face the Scoobies. Well, Xander and Willow, anyway. 

“Spike, where was she? What happened?” Willow asked. 

“Uh….” He glanced at Dawn. Here was where it all came out. “Funny story. See, the thing is, about a week ago--”

“Some demon from the local bar scouted me out,” Dawn said quickly. “A really bad vampire, and he had minions and everything. They kidnapped me outside the Magic Box and brought me here. Spike knew about them and found me, where he fought the big bad and saved me.”

“Kidnapped you outside the Magic Box, huh?” Xander asked. 

“Well, I… I just… wanted to walk home,” Dawn said lamely. “That’s okay, I’m fifteen years old now. I can walk home alone sometimes, can’t I?” 

“Not after dark in Sunnydale, you can’t,” Xander said. “Spike, you couldn’t have gotten here before they munched on her neck?” 

“Oh, that’ll heal in no time,” Willow said. “Tara says she can’t even see my Harmony bite anymore. What about you, Spike?” 

“Uh, I’ll be fine,” Spike said, and immediately belied the statement by wobbling. Dawn pulled him upright. 

“He’s really hurt. We have to be really careful getting him in the car.” 

“I brought a moving blanket,” Willow said, lifting it in her hands. “And Xander cleaned out the trunk when you called. What happened to your car, Spike?” 

“Uh….” 

“One of the minions stole it,” Dawn supplied. “A couple got away. But they won’t be back. Will they?” 

“No,” Spike said firmly. “I don’t think they’ll be back ever again.” 

“Well, that’s it, then. Were these the bad suckers in Lake Casitas?” Willow asked. 

“Yeah,” Spike said. “I think they’re what was making the corpses.” 

“And you took them out?” Xander looked impressed. “Well, that’s… great. Sorry about your car, though. That was a really great car.” 

Spike’s hand clenched. “Tell me about it.” 

“Let’s get you back home,” Willow said. “We have first aid stuff at the house. If you even need it?” 

“He needs it,” Dawn said quickly. 

“Would help,” Spike admitted. A bandage to hold his intestines in firmly for the next twenty-four hours would be nice. Until day eighty after Buffy’s death. Maybe day eighty-two. 

“It’s all going to be okay, Spike,” Dawn said. “It’s over.” She stared at him earnestly. “Really. You can just… come home.”

It wasn’t okay. It was never going to be okay. Buffy was gone, and there was nothing he could do about that except keep on with his unlife, in the world without her in it. But Dawn took his hand, and he’d done what he promised. He’d protected her. At least one time, for all the screw ups, for all the missteps, for all the broken trust, he’d actually managed it. He’d saved the girl. “I saved you,” he said quietly, and smoothed her hair. It would have to be enough. 

He hid himself under the blanket to protect himself from the worst of the burning, and let Dawn lead him out into the light. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my beta bewildered, and everyone who read through this little grimfest. It was nice to come back, even for something pretty short.


End file.
